10 Things You Dislike / Find Challenging About Applying For A Job or Recruiting A New Team Member

Getting the interview for a senior position and then having the interview start: "now about this junior position..."

I applied for a job and it turned out that this guy had 6 people working in the windowless basement of his house. Not my thing...

This was a trend for a while near me: this company had everyone take an aptitude test, including some algebra as a screener. I'm not even sure if personality tests are legal.

Here, sit at this computer with none of your tools or internet connection and write an app in 45 minutes using Notepad.

The weird locations guy asked me to add a thesaurus feature to an open-source email program for less than minimum wage. This was many years ago and at the time quite over my head programming-wise.

Many years ago I was asked, "how good are you at computer language X?" I said, honestly, that I thought I was an expert: after all, I was the best person that I knew at using language X! Well, it turned out that I did not know as many people as I thought. The people that I was being interviewed by contributed to the source code of language X: they wrote it. After a few minutes of talking, everyone disagreed with my self-assessment. I did not get the job.

When I have had the luxury of looking for work while having a job the power seemed fairly balanced because I could take or leave the offer. This led to confidence in the interview and the winning of the jobs.

I have also looked for work with long periods of unemployment. That is awful: I was desperate, and they could smell the fear. I also lacked confidence which led to the loss of many job interviews.

Applying for jobs is miserable and the more you need the job, the worse it gets.

There was an application with many spelling and grammar errors. It turned out this person was from Cuba and very good at programming. They needed to have someone go over their resume. Thankfully we made the hire: I did not see the application until after they were hired.

The other side of #6 - 8.