This goes both ways. Yeah you’re a moron if you text during interviews, but the interviewers can do their part and resist the urge to text, email or take phone calls while you’re trying to talk.
Happened more times than I can count. I actually walked out of one interview for that reason. Respect is a two-way street.
I once turned down a job because the business owner took a call from his wife in the middle of my interview, and he was so nasty and miserable to her, I could not imagine what it would be like to actually work for him.
I second your statement. In 1979 when I was just starting out, I interviewed for a job at Citibank’s Manhattan headquarters. I showed up at the appointed time, and sat outside the HR person’s office for an hour and a half. Her office had windows, so she could see that I was there. She see talked the whole time on the phone to her sister about her sister’s upcoming wedding. After an hour and a half, she got up and left her office. I waited for another half hour before finally going to the receptionist who said “Oh, she left a half hour ago”. I wrote a letter to the top HR executive at Citibank, and I’m sure she caught hell for it. A few days later, they called me back for an interview with a more senior level HR person. But they didn’t hire me.
Let me guess, you are one of the social media generation?
Same here. I could understand a emergency call, but has one interviewer take a clearly personal call. I waited a few minutes to see if they would hang up, they didn’t. When I got up to leave, they hung up, asked me to sit down. I did. They then asked me to remind them were we left off. I walked out.
I agree.
I remember reading an interview with Simon Cowell of American Idol fame. He was trying to sell an American version of Britain’s Pop Idol to AbC, CBS, etc. but they were extremely rude to him.
One interviewer, he said took off his shoes and socks and propped his bare feet on the desk right in Simon’s face, another told Simon to start selling whatever it was he was selling then held up his hand after two seconds, said he’d heard enough and that the answer was “no.”
Fox was his last resort and the rest is history.