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BusinessPublished by BBC Business • 11/6/2026, 12:02:52 AMOpen Original Report (BBC Business) ↗

'I was asked if I was a crier': Your worst job interviews revealed

Tiara Allen arrived on time to interview for a retail job. Her interviewer didn't.

'I was asked if I was a crier': Your worst job interviews revealed
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Tiara Allen says she took the job despite being made to wait 40 minutes before the interview because she needed work
Tiara Allen says she took the job despite being made to wait 40 minutes before the interview because she needed work
Chas Edwards says he thought the interviewer's question for his first job was a joke
Chas Edwards says he thought the interviewer's question for his first job was a joke

Images BBC Business published with this report. Click one to open the source.

Reported by BBC Business

Tiara Allen arrived on time to interview for a retail job. Her interviewer didn't.

She waited for around 40 minutes in a shopping centre while the interviewer's co-worker called them "two or three times".

When they finally showed up, Tiara says she was told it was because the meeting wasn't in the schedule.

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She needed work at the time, so took the job when she was offered it, but says she would handle the situation differently now.

"I would not take a job if they took that long," she says, adding that she believed her treatment during the interview was a sign of how the firm tended to treat staff.

Tiara Allen says she took the job despite being made to wait 40 minutes before the interview because she needed work

Tiara is far from alone. She is one of many people who spoke to the BBC about their worst job interview experiences after we wrote about the one interview question that leaves you feeling uncomfortable .

While those situations can be hard to deal with in the moment, they can also teach us a lot about the world of work.

During an interview for an assistant at a book publisher in New York, Chas Edwards was asked a question he wasn't expecting.

Thinking the interviewer was being funny, Chas replied that he didn't cry. He was later told that this was why he got the job.

"Her last assistant had cried – too often, I guess? – and she wanted someone who didn't cry. So she was being serious and I thought it was a joke," he says.

It was a bad sign. Chas says it was "a terrible, terrible job with a miserable boss" and while he managed to make it through 13 months there without crying he was "crying inside".

"I set the world record for working for this person. No-one had ever lasted three months with her before," he recalls.

Despite all this, Chas says he is in some ways grateful the experience was so awful.

"Because every job since then, even the bad ones, are…

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