Your résumé shows if you're qualified or not. An interview is more about whether you'll click. And people who run those interviews can get pretty tricky with what they judge you on.
Someone asked hiring managers to name any "special tests" they use to secretly judge people during interviews. Here are five different tactics they mentioned.
1. The water test. It's apparently a pretty common one. If they offer you water, saying yes makes you seem confident. But if you chug it too fast, you look nervous. So say yes to water, but just sip.
2. Trying to catch you in a lie. Like pretending to know a non-existent person at one of your old jobs. They say, "Oh, you worked THERE? Do you know Zeke?" If you pretend you do, you're out.
3. Seeing if you're a team player. A manager at a restaurant said they like to leave a broom on the floor to see if the person picks it up when they walk by. If they just step over it, they don't get hired.
4. Asking questions that don't have a correct answer. Hiring managers at Google used to do it a lot. One question they'd ask was, "How many golf balls would fit in a school bus?"
You'd need to know the exact size of the bus and do a lot of math. So the real reason they asked was to see if people would toss out a number, or think it through and explain why a right answer wasn't really possible.
5. Just ask the receptionist. Several people said they always ask the receptionist how the person treated them. So be nice, or you might ruin your chances before your interview even starts.