I debated doing this once. I was still in college interviewing for an entry level position where the company found my resume on some job site and invited me for an interview.
I arrived at the place and was told to go into a large conference room. In the room were about 30 other people all staring at each other wondering what just happened. We were all given a coding test in Java (Java was no where on my resume and I had zero experience with it). After answering what I could with C we were broken up into teams and started a Jeopardy style game on Java and XML. I can't imagine they gained any insight into any candidate with this game since so many different people were answering questions.
Once the game was finished we were then kept in our teams and given engineering problems to work out as a group and then had to present the solutions to the "judges". Every team was pretty much told their answers sucked, I can only compare the feedback to something out of the TV show "Apprentice."
I left the interview completely dumbfounded as to what just happened. People had flown in from out of state to be there for the interview and were blind sided by this horrendous group interview that felt like it took place solely to stroke the ego of the guy leading the whole charade. I also remember the head guy preaching to us that Java was the future and if we didn't learn it we'd be left behind.
I had something like this happen to me, except it was a bait and switch -- they lured you in with some interesting job, but it turned out they were interviewing 75 people for 8 jobs.
At the end, they offered everyone (as in "ok, everyone, you're all a good fit for position EY535353-1") for some horrific job debugging JCL or something to everyone for like $18/hr (this was in 1999), and didn't hire anyone for the good gigs. By that time, the whole crowd was getting unruly, and we basically stormed out.
Years ago I went in for some job where they were advertising a salary of something like GBP35k-40k. I met with their tech guy, got passed up to the CEO and everything is going well.
CEO says something like "You'd be a great fit. Just take this coding test and go complete it in that meeting room over there. And BTW, we can only afford to pay you 25k." "I thought it said 35k." "Yes, but we can't afford that and no one will come for interviews if we say 25k."
I took the test and sat in the meeting room by myself for a few minutes, then went back to the CEO and said I wasn't interested. He kinda shrugged and said fair enough, and gave me a coffee cup with their logo on it for my troubles.
I think they ended up going public a few years later. It might have actually worked out OK for me in the end, ironically enough.
> BTW, we can only afford to pay you 25k." "I thought it said 35k." "Yes, but we can't afford that and no one will come for interviews if we say 25k."
How scummy. That should be an immediate dealbreaker. They've been lying to you even before you knew about their job posting. So you gotta ask yourself if that kind of behaviour will get better, or worse, with time.
I once had a job offer for a certain salary, and I accepted, and when I went in to sign the paperwork it was for less than that.
I should have objected then and there, but I wasn't mature enough. I went through the motions silently stewing, and on the trip home decided I hated the company's guts and told the recruiter I was done. I guess I quit before my start date.
This is an extreme case but in the realm of "fresh out of school kid interviews in mega-corp IT department." Just know that when you have no work experience and are interviewing basically to be a person at a desk you will be subjected to some level of impersonal group weeding.
I arrived at the place and was told to go into a large conference room. In the room were about 30 other people all staring at each other wondering what just happened. We were all given a coding test in Java (Java was no where on my resume and I had zero experience with it). After answering what I could with C we were broken up into teams and started a Jeopardy style game on Java and XML. I can't imagine they gained any insight into any candidate with this game since so many different people were answering questions.
Once the game was finished we were then kept in our teams and given engineering problems to work out as a group and then had to present the solutions to the "judges". Every team was pretty much told their answers sucked, I can only compare the feedback to something out of the TV show "Apprentice."
I left the interview completely dumbfounded as to what just happened. People had flown in from out of state to be there for the interview and were blind sided by this horrendous group interview that felt like it took place solely to stroke the ego of the guy leading the whole charade. I also remember the head guy preaching to us that Java was the future and if we didn't learn it we'd be left behind.