UNIT.City — місце, де люди працюють... КРАЩЕ! Обирай свій простір просто зараз 👉
Марія БровінськаWork
20 January 2025, 16:12
2025-01-20
UPD. “Today I had the worst interview in all my years of work.” The creative shared her experience of a trash interview, where the creative of the CMO played against the company. The CMO wrote a long post with his vision of the situation
Creative Project Manager Oleksandra Pushkareva shared a story from her own experience, which she called the «worst interview» of her career in marketing. We tell you what happened and how IT professionals are reacting to it.
(The news is supplemented with the reaction of the employer’s representative who communicated with the candidate).
Creative Project Manager Oleksandra Pushkareva shared a story from her own experience, which she called the «worst interview» of her career in marketing. We tell you what happened and how IT professionals are reacting to it.
(The news is supplemented with the reaction of the employer’s representative who communicated with the candidate).
«You can congratulate me, I had the worst interview today in all my years of working in marketing. To put it very briefly: a shallow approach in HR, poor preparation of the job description, and the „cherry on the cake“ — stupid (I can’t call it anything else) employees of the company. And jokes about the Russian TV series from the late 2000s, Katya Pushkarev (I have the same name, yes). And this is before the first phone call-acquaintance,» the girl said.
Oleksandra showed the link with the invitation to an interview sent to her by the CMO of one of the well-known crypto projects, who planned to kidnap the girl.
The theme of the invitation sounded like a few lines from a song to a once popular Russian TV series. «We didn’t have a real party. Guess why,» Oleksandra noted.
The girl also wrote a review about this situation on the company’s page on DOU. Accordingly, the company’s name is known.
«I was found on Djinni by an agency’s e-mailer who provided services for the Sabai Protocol company. We communicated for a couple of weeks (it was New Year’s Eve), I was looking into the company, but they really asked me to go through an interview further. I agreed, and I was immediately given a test, without talking to me. Usually, I refuse or ask to pay for it, as a waste of my time. This did not happen, they gave me a test that was very poorly formulated. The main goal (as the e-mailer told me) was „to check the clarity of the formulations and literacy“, while the test itself was multi-textual, without explanations, information was given in one monolith, and also with grammatical errors. I started asking clarifying questions in order to provide the same clarity,» the specialist notes.
According to Alexandra’s logic, poorly formulated TOR = misunderstanding of her work from this test = bad test = poor assessment of the analysis due to misunderstanding.
«What is my motivation to do it? I handed over a list of questions to the e-commerce company, to which I received the answer „yes, okay, I’ll clarify,“ but I didn’t receive any answers,» says the specialist.
Almost a week passed, Oleksandra thought that there would be no further conversation, but the interviewer returned to her again with a request to have an interview today. «It was as if they had handed over my portfolio, and the owners liked it. I asked to postpone it to another day, but they asked me to do it today, as soon as possible. I agreed, and they scheduled it for 5:00 p.m. Immediately after that, there was a question „did I take a test?“, to which I was surprised — because there were no answers to my questions. Then the interviewer asked for my portfolio again, although it was sent in the chat, and was a few lines higher. I pointed this out again. Frankly speaking, HR was not interested in getting acquainted with my material,» the specialist believes.
The girl began preparing for the interview, and about 20 minutes before the call, she received another request from HR: «The owners asked to upload five of their favorite memes, but please, only as pictures, not TikToks.»
«What do you think happened next? That’s right, I refuse and say that it’s not entirely appropriate to write this 20 minutes before the round. My mail is transferred to the SMO to create a joint meeting. His name is Oleksandr Mosaike. And I receive an invitation to the first meeting-acquaintance from him with the following signature: „Invitation from an unknown sender: Don’t look at your sides, stay the way you are — Thu, Jan 16, 2025 5:00 PM — 6:00 PM (GMT+2)“ My last name is Pushkareva and, as you can understand, the SMO decided to show her intellectual abilities and sense of humor in this way. Let me remind you, this was the first meeting. I refused immediately and wrote HR with a detailed fwdback, how I evaluate her and the company’s work. This. Was. Trash,» Oleksandra noted.
Instead of an apology, the girl said, the manager continued to persuade her to go through with the interview. «She even called after that — for which she was immediately sent to the block,» the specialist noted.
IT professionals left 150 comments under the girl’s LinkedIn post. Some assessed the situation she described, others shared their own harrowing interview experiences.
HR Director Yana Khnykina believes that the company that planned to hire Oleksandra is new to the market or small, because HR processes are still raw. «Usually, standardization should be present even in invitations to interviews. Interview with (Candidate Name) (Position). And that creativity from a soundtrack lover is a lack of corporate ethics,» she believes.
«How dare you filter out this company at an early stage of processing. Once, during a bar-raising interview, a top manager told me that he has such an approach, and it is quite well-known and widespread: to determine whether you will work, the hiring manager must imagine sex with this candidate, whether there is disgust. And, he says, the method works, it has been tested,» shared Head of Creative Marketing Production Kateryna Nazarenko.
Senior Software Quality Assurance Engineer Andriy Gorbach told about his worst interview. «My experience is Ukrainian companies that still work with Russians and do not shy away from discussions and jokes about the war with them. Another one is a placement on a project at Strikersoft, I signed an offer. And in 10 minutes the recruiter suggested a callback, during which she remembered that she forgot to say that my onboarding buddy and mentor would be a Russian. But «very good».”
ADDED. On January 20, Head of Marketing Sabay Protocol Oleksandr Mosyako decided to respond to Oleksandra’s post.
We are publishing his post in full.
«Who would have thought that this Friday Alexandra Pushkarjova would write the most interesting post of her career. Yes, before that she worked for three months at TakeHOT, where her posts on Instagram gained 10-20 likes. But this Friday she discovered the «miracles» of hate speech, manipulation and outright lies and decided to «throw» them at me and my company. LinkedIn, as it turned out, is not immune to hate posts, and she collected a record 500+ likes. But at what cost… I’m a Twitter user, I love that shit, and I don’t plan to stay away. I’m ready to give everyone bread and spectacle.
Well, I wrote the clickbait, and now I’ll tell you what really happened 🔪 🐥
Actor 1
I am a CMO who opened a vacancy for an SMM manager, calmly looking for a person for a cool team. The task is just to manage Twitter and Telegram with 200,000 communities. And get my honest $2,000 for it. I tell you: the project is cool.
For those who are not familiar with the topic, SMM professionals in Ukraine are usually offered from $500 to $1,000.
Here’s what our offer included:
The salary is twice the market average.
A lot of «buns» (payment for a psychologist, training, equipment).
Flexible schedule without being tied to the office.
Assistance with relocation to Thailand upon request.
Actor 2
Oleksandra Pushkareva sent her resume and portfolio through an HR agency, in which her experience was presented chaotically, with a violation of chronology and logic. The portfolio looked fun and interesting at first, but the number of likes (10–20) under her posts on TakeHOT, to put it mildly, was not impressive.
To give her a chance, without further ado, I asked the HR agency to send her a test assignment.
About the test task
This task was completed by about 20 candidates, including juniors, and no one had any problems with it. The task involved processing loosely structured information and creating an interesting post for social media. It took a maximum of 20 minutes.
Unfortunately, Ms. Pushkareva could not cope with the task, did not understand its essence and refused to complete it. It was necessary to finish it immediately, but I decided to give her another chance and offered to conduct an interview.
Disclaimer — memes and humor
Since I’m hiring people for the marketing team, I often ask them to send me a few of their favorite memes. It helps to understand their sense of humor, train of thought, and sometimes even creativity. But here too, Ms. Pushkareva refused.
There were 20 minutes left before the interview, and I created an appointment in my calendar called «Don’t look at the other side, stay the same.» Yes, it was almost the end of the work week, and I don’t regret anything. A little cringe, yes, but you can’t survive without self-irony in our time.
As a result, Ms. Pushkareva didn’t even make it to the interview, didn’t understand the test, literally fucked the recruiter who didn’t say a single bad word to her (there are screenshots of the chat). And spent Friday evening trying to fix something that didn’t really happen. Insulting the team and calling people she didn’t communicate with stupid. Now I understand why no one has hired her for 5 years and left her out of the team (see her profile).»
Also in the comments to Oleksandr’s post, the discussion between the candidate for the SMO continues.
«Her questions were more and more like improvisation. In the end, I didn’t even feel like I was being evaluated as a specialist.» The creative told about a messy interview for which the recruiter was not prepared. It turns out that there are many such situations. Why?
