Comment by mcintyre1994 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcintyre1994 | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed recently with Citadel in London, they're one of them market maker financial companies with a bunch of tech and shiny offices. I was told we'd have a few interviews, and lunch in the middle (we started at 1pm). Apparently I didn't do well enough in the second interview (writing random Python algorithms on a laptop - in fairness, not a whiteboard), so after a while the guy doing the second interview walked out, left me alone for about 10 minutes (it's okay, their conference rooms have a nice view over the river!), and then my first interviewer came back and told me that unfortunately my next interviewer wasn't available. I asked what would happen next and they said they'd have to rearrange the whole thing and walked me out the building. It was obvious it didn't go well but I found it so pathetic that they didn't even tell me, lied about the next interviewer and then even pretended they were going to be back in touch to rearrange things.

I find it a useful experience though. Next time I'm talking with a recruiter and they mention Citadel I'll know they don't do their homework on checking how candidates are treated and I won't work with them.

I know nothing about Citadel, but it may be unfair to generalize from one experience. For example, that particular group may be bad but other groups may be fine and don't know about the bad group.

If you're feeling particularly bold, the ideal is to report that bad group to Citadel. Then, after sufficient time for an internal review, follow up and ask if anything has been done, and if not, then conclude your generalization.

With that said, I wouldn't be surprised if our bayesian priors about the morality of financial institutions are correct, but it helps to empirically validate this and publish findings so that, over time, these institutions are validly, publicly shamed.

Is it common for employers to leave you sitting alone in a conference room during an interview with no explanation or instructions? This happened to me straight out of college and I didn't handle it well admittedly during a poor interview on my part, I was already incredibly anxious and frustrated from my poor performance and I just walked out and never looked back.

I feel like this is an actual interview tactic in some book somewhere although I can't imagine why.

That's the only time it's happened to me. It's fun to think that it was a tactic and I was supposed to either leave or do that one magic trick to wow them and change their mind :) but more likely I think the second guy just decided it was a no but was too awkward to say, so panicked and went to find the first guy to ask him to tell me.

It's unlikely to be tactic, in general. If it's in a normal working day (as against a specific hiring event), it's likely to be a minor failure of logistics.

In your case, it's probably not that. It's more likely that the second interviewer thought that it wasn't worth their time carrying on with the interview. For example, if their expectations of your experience/knowledge were way off reality. Very rude of them not to just say so if that is the case though.

This happened to me I think every time I was interviewed. But this was only being left for a short time between interviews (but maybe I was told that some next step would happen in a few minutes). Waiting time depends from place to place. Eg at a small company in a glass walled room where whoever was to interview me next could see me from their desk, the waiting times were shorter.

I sympathise with feeling anxious about it but I suppose the only thing to do about that is to hope you won’t get long waiting times or to go to a lot of interviews and come to expect it.

I doubt it is a tactic as it doesn’t reflect well on the company. Are they looking for someone who won’t mind if their colleagues are late for a meeting?

Being dishonest is the way out of tricky situations where one's feelings get hurt. This is okay, if the interviewee doesn't have right skills. What if the interviewee is extremely good and yet can't perform in that interview? Then, one can follow your foot steps.

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