More Bad Interviews

So here we go with interviews, round 2. Only this time it gets really weird. Bad boss does 2 phone interviews with 2 more candidates that I rejected. This time he doesn't even invite bad employee. He decides that we should bring in both candidates. Candidate 1 is from the area, has lots of QA experience but most of it short term, and none of it health care related which is really important. Candidate 2 puts on his (or her - can't really tell by the name) resume that he has knowledge of Medicare/Medicaid. I rejected this candidate because I believe the resume was padded. This person worked for a company that made ferry boats and then worked for a bank - so where the hell would Medicare/Medicaid come in?? Did I mention that the resume was so full of spelling and grammar errors that it was extremely difficult to read? But bad boss says the guy has lots of Medicare experience - he says when you follow the breadcrumbs it all came out in the phone interview so we should really bring him in.

Bad boss has a new boss who is really tough, so I mention to her my concern and send her a copy of the resume. I thought she was going to flip - she didn't even want to discuss the qualifications, the look of the resume was enough of a bad sign to her. Did I mention that this candidate lives in New Jersey? So bad boss wants to fly bad candidate in for an interview! Tough new boss says no, so bad boss makes the QA team phone interview.

The interview was an amazing exercise in futility. The first thing that happened is this guy spoke in bad broken English so fast none of us understood 75% of his words. When we finally go a word in we asked about the Medicare/Medicaid experience. He read the textbook definition of Medicare. We asked which state's Medicaid rules he knew, He read the textbook definition of Medicaid. We asked when he used this knowledge in his work and he got angry. He said I NEVER SAID I WORKED WITH IT I SAID I HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF IT. The guy then quoted answers to questions we normally ask about knowledge of UB04 forms and RUGs codes. But we didn't ask those questions - turns out bad boss gave him the answers and told him we would ask. I then asked the guy if he ever wrote documentation, instructions, or manuals. He said yes, he did manual testing. I reiterated the question. He answered the same so he couldn't even understand what I was asking. By then we all gave up and said thanks for your time.

We tried, but it was pretty awful. We were laughing at the answers to simple questions that this guy either didn't understand or we couldn't comprehend because of his accent. Even bad employee rejected him. Which is unusual - I'm sure bad employee would love it if we hired someone worse than him. We reported back to bad boss, then reported it to human resources, then reported it to tough boss. Bad boss was in trouble.

Next thing you know, bad boss is saying that the people doing the phone interviews must have been two different people since he had such a good experience. We quoted the stuff the candidate repeated that bad boss told him. Plus if you were going to have someone sit in to interview for you, would you want someone who didn't totally suck?

I think bad boss knows he's in deep doo-doo.