Can I Walk Out on an Interview? | JobSearchTV.com
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Sometimes, you may find yourself in a situation where the job is not what was represented to you or you are just doing badly and don’t want to embarrass yourself anymore. Can you just walk out?
When I coach people around this kind of situation, I start off by saying, job descriptions that we’re going to see are not completely accurate. If you’re lucky, they’re 80% accurate. And thus, I want you to start off the interview by saying, “Thanks so much for making time to meet with me. I recall the position description, but I want to get your 
take on the role. Can you tell me about the job as you see it and what I can do to help.” The idea is, I want you to hear about the job at the beginning of the interview so you can talk about what you’ve done that matters to them, and not just talk about what you’ve done.
But what happens if the job isn’t interesting when you hear about it. What do you do if it seems different than what you read in the job description or what your friend, Sue, told you about? What do you do then?
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Well, this is the way you follow up. And you say, “You know, when I read the job description it suggested that you were looking for someone with this kind of background, but I’m hearing something pretty different. Could you kind of mesh that for me or tell me how this works together?”
And, thus, if they say “No, what I really need to such and such. What I did was get this job description approved through HR. Previously, I used that to get going on this job.”
“Oh, you see, my background isn’t along those lines. My background really actually relates to the job description, but not what we’re actually looking for. Now, if you’d like, we can keep talking. But I just want to be clear that this isn’t my background.”
And thus they can they can say to you, “Oh, we’ll do that.”
“Really? And how do you think you’re going to adapt the job given the fact that that’s not my experience?” At which point you’ve made it clear, it’s not you. And sometimes it takes twice to get the point across and it can come to a polite ending rather than an abrupt one.
If you’re in an interview, and the person is being rude to you, or they’re asking a lot of questions about things that you don’t have a lot of experience with, you can pause at a natural breakpoint and say, “I’m getting the idea that you’re looking for someone actually with different background than I have for this role.” And you can also say “or you’re looking for someone with more experience for this role. Am I reading this right?” And then they can say, “Yeah, I’m getting the idea that you’re not really strong around such and such.”
And thus, without picking yourself on walking out, you’re maturely bringing the conversation to an end by calling attention to something that’s pretty obvious to you. That’s really the way to handle it. Just abruptly getting up and walking out– That’s what kids do. But as an adult, you don’t know when you’re going to run into this person again, or where they’re going to be in a position of authority where they can evaluate you and say “This person walked out on me.”
I know it’s a big city, a big country, a lot of people out there. And the likelihood of that seems small to you now, but trust me, it happens more than you believe.
[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81E_l4vQ-s4[/svp]
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. His work involves career coaching, as well as executive job search coaching, job coaching, and interview coaching. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2200 episodes.
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On rare occasions I have had the manager on an interview abruptly terminate the multi-person interviews. When I reached out to the recruiter afterwards they finally understood that the laundry list of skills the client wanted were all must-haves (I wished her good luck hiring 4 different people to cover all of them).
On other occasions, the actual team lead made it clear that the position was nothing approximating the job req posted, and it simply made no sense to continue the convo. The HR lead agreed.
That said, with the sudden flip from in-office to remote work, I’ve interviewed too many candidates that ejected themselves from the interview, some with profanities…. Brave new world indeed
The job req was posted because it was previously approved and the hiring manager was too lazy/busy (I’ll let you decide which) to update it. So when someone quit or left the assignment, they asked their HR business partner to work with it as the guide and didn’t update it.As for the brave new world, it is the same as the old world except done online.