What should I do if the environment for an in-person interview is distracting?

Question

I had an in-person interview. The office was one big open room. There were two people sitting close to me interviewing me. There was another person close by who was working. He started talking very loudly on the phone (I think for a work-related conversation). It honestly messed me up when I was trying to answer interview questions.

Should I have said anything or expected the interviewers to say anything? Given there wasn't any separate rooms in the office I guess there wasn't anything that could've been done.

As a bit of an aside, one of the people running the interview got sidetracked and started a tangent conversation with him. The other person running the interview got a bit annoyed with him. Does this reflect bad on the company or individual, or would that be jumping to assumptions?

Answer 1

An interview is a two way street. They checked you out. You checked them out. It seems their normal day to day operations is doing their jobs in environments full of distractions. I would not want to work there. You probably don't want that either. Good thing you had this interview, so you can put that application away and focus on the other ones.

It might have been admissible if they had apologized profoundly and explained why this is a one-time only problem. Maybe in winter the heating in the conference room broke just this morning and the landlords people are in there fixing it right now. Or in summer they found a wasp nest right outside the window and had to have it removed by professionals. Whatever the one-time mess is, it happens despite the best planning.

But this did not seem like an unplanned interruption. It seemed like their normal way of conducting business. So, decide whether that is a job you would enjoy and act accordingly.

Answer 2

I have been to a lot of job interviews in my life. Sometimes the interviewers said weird things during the interview, and sometimes the interviewers had not read my CV beforehand. However, never was I denied the common courtesy of being interviewed in a quiet room with only me and the interviewers present.

To deny you such a thing, I think, is just flat out impolite and should be considered a red flag. If the company really doesn't have a separate quiet room available that should be a red flag too. Do they treat visiting customers the same way as you?

Answer 3

Having an interview in an unusual setting is not necessarily a bad thing. I landed one of my most fulfilling jobs through an interview ad-lib conducted in public.

I was scheduled for a job interview at a school in a foreign country. Travel arrangements were made. At my arrival and due to unforeseen circumstances, the headmaster was unable to conduct the interview in his office as planned. Instead the staff kindly helped me get to him at a local church, where a student orchestra was rehearsing for a performance the same evening.

The street outside was bustling. Due to orchestral activity it was not possible to talk in the church itself. The only available space was a lengthy narrow indoor corridor between the two, where a multitude of elderly people sat on chairs lined up against both walls chatting. I still recall 25 years later the headmasters look as he briefly considered options, then resolutely grabbed two chairs and sat them face to face squarely in the middle of the corridor inviting me to sit.

So I had my interview on the spot and with a keenly interested audience listening in, an experience not even closely repeated before or since.

It was a pleasant interview, I got to see how helpful and professional the school staff was when things go wrong, as well as the amicable way with which the headmaster accepted an unforeseen situation, adapted and asserted his decisions in a constructive manner. The headmaster (together with a portion of the local elderly community) could similarly observe me. A potentially very uncomfortable situation for us both instead became a pleasant and in retrospect humorous memory for life for me.

I was offered the job and gladly accepted. Had my impression been a bad one, I would hardly have done so.

So my suggestion is not to judge the employer so much based on the perhaps unavoidable necessity of being interviewed in close vicinity of others, but on the information about the workplace you yourself can pick up from such a proceeding.

From your question I see that your experience left you with questions about the workplace culture which rather easily could have been avoided by a more skilled interviewer, and with a feeling of having involuntarily inconvenienced others. What more information did the workplace give? Work with what you received.

Answer 4

Does this reflect badly on the company or individual?

Bad here is entirely subjective; that's rather the crux of the issue.

You seem to be approaching this from the angle of

I didn't like aspects of how they conducted this interview. Should I have expected them to explain or apologise for these aspects?

Consider another angle:

The interview accurately mirrored their usual working environment. It was simply presented as was, without comment, and I had the opportunity to honestly evaluate it.

Looking at it that way, you can see something counter-intuitive: bad as it was in your opinion, it was actually a very good interview in the broad sense. You got to see that you likely wouldn't enjoy that working environment, a key factor you can now consider should you get an offer.

Ironically, it would have been a bad interview if they had apologised and assured you these kinds of things don't usually happen, then you take the job and it turns out they actually do.

Answer 5

Your interview bombed. Maybe it wasn't your fault. Maybe it was their fault. But if you have one interviewer distracted and not even worth worrying about showing you the common courtesy to leave before having another conversation, and a second interviewer is irritated (even if it is at the other person, and not irritated at your), then you have interviewers who weren't impressed by their experience in the meeting. That doesn't look well for you.

Keep in mind that non-excellence could just be an aberration. For instance, I recall I had a job interview once where I took a test on a computer, and so I was in a little-used lobby area near the front door. The main work area was free of irrelevant loud sounds (as this was a call center). Some loud employees went nearby that lobby area and made it hard for me to hear the recordings as part of the computerized hearing test. I ended up getting the job, and learning that they really should have stepped outside before being that loud.

In your case, though, this wasn't some low-on-the-totem people who were acting unfortunate. These were the interviewers, who are often people you report to.

If something goes poorly in an interview, there is rarely forgiveness. Case in point: I remember my boss describing an interview, where he asked something that unknowingly touched upon the recent death of the candidate's father. A truly bad coincidence, but what really harmed the candidate is that his response left the interviewer to feel awkward. In our problem-handling department, sometimes things don't go well, yet standards are high and we're expected to consistently make the best of situations. The fact that this sensitive topics was stumbled upon was a completely unintentional accident. Even still, the situation ended up revealing that the candidate's response was unimpressive.

Whether this sounds desirable or not, the truth is that an interview's results can be harsh. Any ounce of imperfection seen by a candidate may, or might not, cost the candidate considerably. (The amount of forgiveness can vary based on who is doing the interview.) If an environment messes you up, that will cost you in some interviews. The best you can be expected to do is to simply try to make the interview be the best possible, and if you don't succeed in this one, keep trying again. (If the opportunity comes up later, you might even want to try again with the same organization. Even many interviewers who will silently judge harshly during an interview, and who might remember imperfection from a prior interview, may still be prone to offer more forgiveness for an incident from a prior time, on the grounds that they understand that growth/improvement may have happened since then.)

Answer 6

I once had an interview for a programming job over lunch in a restaurant with two other people at our table and this was very distracting. The interviewers deliberately set the situation up and it adds another way of separating the candidates. You can practice this kind of situation by creating it yourself with friends. Take it slowly, concentrate on the speaker, listen to the questions and take advantage of the pauses to have a mouthful to eat.