'I walked out of my interview today': Candidate walks out of an interview after interviewer is 15 minutes late

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Aug 17, 2023 12:00 PM EDT

A job interview is just as much for a candidate to see if they want to work for a company as it is for a company to see if they want the candidate to work for them. The application and interview process can be so stressful and intensive for a candidate that this often gets overlooked, with candidates who are too desperate or eager to please get themselves into exploitative situations after missing extremely obvious red flags during interviews.

Let us be brutally honest here, most of the time, a single red flag from a candidate—or what the interviewers perceive to be a glimpse of one—is enough to disqualify a candidate from the entire interview process, even if they're the leading candidate in all other areas. A single bad hire can be crippling to a team or small business, so oftentimes, a company would rather not hire—leaving the position vacant—than hire someone who could wind up being a potential risk.

So, candidates should consider the same. With all the meticulously calculated theatrics involved in the interview process, if an interviewer is unable to conceal or overlooks a glaringly obvious red flag, then the interviewer should turn tail and run without a second thought.

That's what this candidate did after their interviewer, the director of the company, was 15 minutes late to their scheduled interview. They took that as a sign of a red flag and decided that it wasn't going to be a good fit.

They shared their experience with a popular online community for workplace discussion, telling of the events as they unfolded and stirring discussion in the responses from readers.