In the past couple of weeks, I have had a handful of job interviews where it felt "fake." For example, job interviews where:<p>1) enthusiastic questions are aimed to pick candidates’ brains for fresh ideas.<p>Or<p>2) interviewer appears annoyed with interview process, gives vague introduction and asks lame & predictable questions. (Which translates to: "insider" candidate has already been selected, so stop wasting my time)<p>So, the question is, are there such thing as fake job interviews in NYC?<p>Thanks in advance.
I have seen it in Product Management interviews repeatedly.<p>Interviewing with TripAdvisor is basically agreeing to an intellectual property/idea anal probing. They do it for sport and never fill the positions.<p>Probably because the company is fresh out and their products are getting blown away by mobile startups...<p>That was in Greater Boston area...
Can you identify a few places you interviewed with? Also, are you using a recruiter?<p>I'm going to try to limit my response:<p>I don't consider (1) to be "fake" in the sense that thought-provoking questions aren't meant to be fake. I like asking open-ended questions because I want to be sure that I am dealing with creative people who can think on the spot. In some industries (e.g. finance), being able to quickly think of a solution is important. And yes, I am much more impressed when people can answer in ways that I did not think about (and I've landed offers at many places precisely because I was able to think of clever solutions that the interviewer didn't think about beforehand)
I won't say it's common practice, but I'm aware of people at a few companies (not just startups, but some Fortune 500 ones as well) who use "interviews" to gather competitive intelligence and ideas.<p>Given your (1), it sounds like you might have run into that at least once. What industry / role were you talking to them about?