We’ve talked recently about people who are applying to jobs that are clearly different from what they want to do, and here are 12 of my favorite stories you’ve shared.
1. Lack of turtles
I worked with a lot of field biologists who were unsuited, mostly because they went into the field because they liked being outside and then were shocked to find that the work involved a lot of boring and monotonous getting out of the way and keeping meticulous records. But my favorite non-friendly coworker was okay with all this! Except that she really wanted to survey for turtles. Sadly, a lot of our projects don’t involve turtles. She still did a great job, but all of her field reports would include lines like, “There were no turtles there,” “Saw a turtle on my lunch break when I hiked a mile along the waterway,” “There is absolutely no habitat for turtles in this area, but I found some potential areas along the drive up to this site,” and my favorite, “I thought I saw a turtle, but it was rocks.”
I loved her so much, stopped by her house once to meet her 20-something turtles and had a lot of fun. Eventually he got a better paying job, though sadly it wasn’t turtle-centric.
2. Honesty
HR and I were interviewing my replacement. It was an admin position supporting a sales team and a few managers. This was going well until the interviewer said, “I hate being constantly interrupted by people who need things.”
3. Wrong choice
There was an internal applicant from a different department who stated in the cover letter that they were trying to get away from a supervisor with whom they did not have a good rapport. The supervisor who was the center of my department’s work. Who were in the search committee. And who will work more closely with my new hire than most of his direct reports. Also, the cover letter was emailed to me separately instead of being included with the rest of the application materials. I immediately contacted HR to make sure we had that cover letter on file in case there was any pushback from the candidate (whom we had already scheduled for a panel interview).
4. Computer
I was once in an interview where an applicant spent a lot of time talking about how much he hated computers and working on computers. We work virtually entirely on computers and were part of the public paperless initiative so…
5. Veterinary Assistant
Applicant at a veterinarian’s office who was a) afraid of cats and b) screamed about both blood and feces. This was for a veterinary assistant position from a kennel, not a receptionist. I’m not sure what she really thought she would do.
6. Junior Reporter
One reason I became a hit as a junior reporter in a rural newspaper was the difference between me and my predecessor. Interested instead in court stories, local events and making contacts, she took up working at the newspaper because she thought it would be a springboard towards becoming an actress in a local soap opera. The newspaper didn’t even have a showbiz or entertainment section, we had no connection to soap operas, and we didn’t even live in the same city as them. I asked my new coworkers how they planned to pull off this change and the response was, “Well, obviously it was quite misguided and maybe she gave up after realizing this; most of the time she was either making a lot of noise, or she was napping in her car.”
7. Future Librarian
A few years ago, a retired teacher called the library reference desk to ask about jobs in the youth section. She continued to explain how, after so many years of teaching, what she really needed was a job with peace and quiet. I don’t know if any of you have been to a library in recent years, but the youth department is not quiet – it is a hive of activity and cute kids and teens make lots of delightful noise! This is not for the faint of heart! Or for anyone looking for peace and quiet!
I didn’t tell the retired teacher anything about it; I felt that if she had come for the interview it would have been better if she had said so. No retired teacher came for job.
8. Bees
I do research on honey bees. Every year my group hires one or two field assistants, usually graduate students who usually don’t have a lot of research experience. It is always surprising the number of people who make it clear in interviews that they do not want to work with honey bees, given that we are very clear on the job advertisement that the responsibilities primarily involve working with honey bees. Special props to the guy who very sincerely tried to convince us to hire him to do our research on stingrays (???) – my best guess is that he somehow thought it was a grant and not a job.
9. teacher
My brother’s Leaving Cert Irish teacher had 16-18 year olds making badges and learning songs, which she would have them sing when the principal visited. It was a high level class and the Higher Level Leaving Certificate Irish exams included writing a short essay in Irish on topics like climate change or unemployment or drug addiction and questions on Irish novels and drama and poetry and at that time there was a section on the history of the Irish language which included questions like, in the Irish language, how to interpret placenames. It became a country. But yes, making badges and singing for the principal!
She could have become a talented primary school teacher.
10. Anime fan
I work for a large financial institution and a few years ago interviewed a candidate for a compliance internship who clearly mistook my company for a cable TV channel and spent the entire interview talking about how much he loved anime.
Very sweet kid, but apparently he was like that in all five of his Super Day interviews. I still don’t fully understand how you get to the interview stage of a highly competitive finance internship without feeling like you applied to the completely wrong job at the wrong company, but things got easier when we rejected him for his lack of attention to details.
11. Surprising Choice
I was recruiting for positions for the student package center at a small college. One of the people I interviewed told me she didn’t like “packaging, answering phones or dealing with people.” Which was actually the main function of the job, and was very clearly stated in the job description. She was so truthful about it, I almost thought she was kidding me because why would you apply to a job where the job responsibilities are entirely things you claim to dislike.
She was not.
I often wonder if she was surprised when she wasn’t hired.
12. Whale
This caused me to drop a graduate class that I was really excited about. In the first week of Intro to Creative Memoirs, every single minute my professor spent talking about whales, showing us videos of whales, telling us what products we needed to boycott to save the whales. Every so-called memoir on our reading list was actually a book based on…you guessed it. The other day I started a match. She used the word “whale” about 100 times in the 80-minute class, “write” or “write” less than a dozen times, and “memoir” not at all.
I’m staunchly pro-whale but gosh.
