# Red Apples, Green Apples — and the Interviewer Who Stopped Listening

**[TRUE STORY]** — by Candidate · via r/recruitinghell

She was working in customer service and applied for an HR support role — answering employees’ questions about activating accounts, payslips, schedules. The same conversations, aimed inward instead of outward.

The interviewer asked how many phone calls she handled a day. She began to explain that her current team handled customer contacts through email and live chat. Before she could finish the sentence, the interviewer said, oh, okay then, in a tone that ended the subject.

Later she asked how the HR team communicated. About seventy per cent, she was told, went through email and tickets; the remaining thirty per cent was phone calls or people stopping by a desk. The call volume had never been the point. The exact-match version of her job had been.

She had more examples. The pattern, as she described it, is a hiring manager who treats a different job as an insult rather than adjacent experience — and then leaves the role open for months, because the only person who already does that job is someone they would have to hire internally. Which, for the lowest-level roles, they do not do.

She wrote that interviewing was making her question why anyone bothers.

*Source: [r/recruitinghell · viral post](https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/1xatk25/we_love_your_experience_in_picking_red_apples_but/)*
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