Unexpected moments during job interviews are not always unprofessional. Yes, sometimes they indicate big red flags, but sometimes they are just funny, spontaneous moments that reveal endearing aspects of a candidate’s personality.
This collection gathers stories told from the interviewers’ perspective — feel free to draw your own conclusions about what these moments reveal about the candidate’s personality!
You can also check out our article featuring the weirdest and funniest moments from the candidates’ perspective.
Enjoy!
10. A passion for undetectable guns
One guy couldn’t stop talking about his passion for 3D printing. And specifically printing undetectable guns.
Obviously we were all interested and wanted to know more about that world and niche. And the way he spoke about it was just hypnotic.
But a bigger red flag I couldn’t have made up.
9. Devil in the details
Not during the interview, but right after the interview, a candidate emailed to thank the team: “I’d love to contribute to your open-source Satan project.” Instead of “Scala project,” autocorrect had struck again. We don’t maintain that repo… yet.
8. Time for revenge?
I got to interview my ex-manager who had laid me off at a previous company.
7. Sheer honesty
When asked: “Where do you see yourself in five years?” a developer replied: “Honestly? Hopefully maintaining code that isn’t full of legacy spaghetti. And maybe finally escaping Jira tickets.” The panel laughed.
6. The pajama pants reveal
A senior developer nailed a live coding session in a formal shirt, looking every bit professional. At the end, he leaned back proudly, forgetting he was on camera, and revealed bright blue pajama bottoms covered in Tux the Linux penguin.
At least he was distro-neutral.
5. Bye!
Candidate: “I’m not here to actually interview. I just want this to be a practice interview for other companies.”
I walked out.
4. Vibe coder spotted
Was phone-interviewing someone for a technical position. I could hear him tapping away on a keyboard (likely trying to Google the answer) every time I asked him while he meandered around the answer. The sad part was, he wasn’t even able to search for the right thing, more than once.
Some context, the questions were pretty basic, related to the technology stack we were interviewing for. The dude had an extremely impressive resume and it became evident during the call that most of it was less than truthful.
3. Biggest achievement
Me: “What is your biggest achievement?”
Him: “I had perfect attendance in 3rd grade.”
I glance down at his resume and it has a section for awards — and the only thing listed was his 3rd grade perfect attendance award.
This wasn’t a young person fresh out of high school. This was a degreed software engineer with 10 years of post-university experience.
2. International developer
Me: “So what language have you been using the most these days?”
Developer: “English.”
1. The candidate had a point
When I worked for AWS I was 5 minutes into an interview with a candidate when I realized they weren’t the candidate.
Me: “…wait, you’re not [redacted]? Why didn’t you say anything when I asked if it was still a good time to talk?”
Guy: “I mean, someone calls me and starts asking questions about if it’s a good time to talk about a job at AWS I’d be stupid to say no, right?”
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