*Interviewer pursuing his own personal agenda, hiring process had no direction.*
Outsourced and very confused hiring process. The setup was KBR using external recruiter to hire contractor for project. Also some context: me = UK-based candidate applying for Middle East position. Applied for Senior Process engineer, as advertised, was then told that the position was actually Lead Process engineer. Fine, I decided, keep going.
First interview with a Project Manager (of European origin). Quite searching, mostly experience-based, describe what you did in such-and-such previous roles. Despite recruiter telling me it was only going to be a 1-stage interview, Project Manager surprises me by saying there will be a 2nd-stage technical interview. Seemed like it had never been part of any plan and was being dreamt up at the last minute. Still, I thought, keep going.
Was not so optimistic I would get 2nd stage, but I did. Technical interviewer was a specialist, Indian national based in Middle East. What followed on the day of that interview was 45 minutes with the worst interviewer of my 20-year career.
-Hostile attitude in questions from the very beginning. Why am I applying, what have I done.
-Constantly interrupted. Would ask unclear question "Tell me about xxxx" then as soon as I had said two sentences, would interrupt saying "That's not what I want"
-Became clear that his English was worse than mine, in fact his own qualifications on LinkedIn were less than mine. Spent a lot of the interview proving that he knew more than me about specific topics.
-Whenever I got a question right, zero recognition. I got approx. 50% of the questions spot on, with some hints needed in others. Whenever I got it fully correct, he would just silently go to another question. It seemed like all he wanted to prove was what I did _not_ know, rather than what I did know.
-Pointedly ignored huge portions of my relevant experience whenever that experience was something he himself did not have. Always trying to prove he was better.
-Some questions were unbelieveable, things which no normal person is likely to remember.
E.g. "You did xxxx 6 years ago, what was the exact specification of the xxxx machine needed to do xxxx".
Or "What is a typical concentration in parts per million for the contaminant X in this oil?" Never mind that he was expecting me to remember superfine details of a project that I did six years ago. Also, the contaminant varies by location, by oilfield and by oil well, so the question has multiple correct answers. When I gave a reasonable answer, he disagreed and started getting angry.
After interview, I called the recruiter and politely told him I am not interested in working for unreasonable people. My own opinion is that, the interviewer guy had his own agenda, he was either
(i) a reverse-racist and had something against Western candidates
(ii) trying to destroy other candidates so that his own preferred (internal) candidate could get through, or
(iii) his character is staggeringly arrogant and he truly thinks he is God's gift to engineering.
When faced with a company that treats you in this way _before_ you have even joined, it is better when the candidate rejects them.
