re: ACTUAL Employment Interview Red Flags

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I used to have someone go look in their car and see if it was messy while I interviewed them. If it was I threw their resume away.

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This isn’t interview related but I was talking to some decent looking chick in a bar and ended up walking her back to her car. She had like three pounds of beads and dream catchers hanging from her rear view mirror. That was all I needed to see. Never talked to her again.

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University of Phoenix, and other diploma mills

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UoP isn't a "diploma mill." They have their issues, though.

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Dirt is fine. These were O&G mechanics and techs. I get the job because I did it for years.

I’m talking about a weeks worth of dirty clothes and food wrappers everywhere, not some caliche dirt and your lunch bag from an hour ago.

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Agreed. I'm a plumber. There's a fine line between having a dirty work truck and just being a lazy fricking slob.

I'm a neat and orderly guy. It doesn't take much to put things back in the same place, make sure parts, pipe, fittings all find their home on the truck, scrap gets pulled off at the end of the day, etc.

I work with one guy who spends two hours a day cleaning his truck. That's fricking nonsense. We've got work to do. And frankly if you spent that much time on it even just once a week it shouldn't be that out of order you need that much time the next day. You're just bullshitting at this point.

Conversely some guys just throw trash anywhere in their trucks. Some of them are good plumbers, and some of them are dogshit. The guys with trash all over their trucks seem more apt to be the stereotypical white trash you'd think of. Maybe it's how they were raised.

Frankly it doesn't take much effort to throw your trash away and put tools and such back in the truck on the proper home and go on about your work day. To me anything other than that is laziness. It also shouldnt take more than a few minutes if you simply do it that way every single time, every single job.

I interviewed an attorney candidate last winter. He told me his goal for the new year was to play more video games. I appreciated the honesty it it did not help him.

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What are some real red flags?

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Bad mouthing a former or previous employer during the interview.

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Bringing another person to the interview. Nope.

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I've heard this is a real thing... I'd die of embarrassment. My half caf double mocha triple shot espresso latte with half whip over ice is enough for me. And my fidget spinner, of course.

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Had a guy on a recent interview say he needed to get the frick out of his current position

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Like my uncle says, a man will only take so much

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Bringing another person to the interview. Nope.

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I think I’ve told this here before but I’ll tell it again

I interviewed a guy for a field engineer job that HR screened. I was passing back through Katy so I told him to pick a place for lunch and we’d meet. This MFer shows up with his wife and all 600 combined lbs of them ran up a $200 lunch bill. Then I find out this dude isn’t qualified to change the oil much less what we needed. At least my boss thought it was funny when I expensed it.

ETA CSB for anyone who thought that part was funny. When I walked out my truck had been broken into and my laptop bag stolen. All my thumb drives with my past data were in it. A dumpster diver at Petco (gross!) found my bag sans laptop but with my drives in and and called me so I got it all back.

Asking about vacation and holidays during the initial interview.

That’s something for later, but if you’re concerned about vacation in our first conversation, I’m not interested.