The first round had gone fine. The third round, as it turned out, would be fine too. It was the second — three people in a room, one of them already leaning forward — that curdled almost immediately.
Not long after the candidate finished introducing themselves, one of the interviewers raised his voice. What followed was not a question but a lecture, the better part of twenty minutes, on what he called professionalism and on how young people no longer understand sacrifice. He wanted to know whether the candidate was prepared to give up holidays.
The candidate had a plain answer, and it did not seem to land: they had already worked holidays. At an earlier job they had grown used to shifts that started at half past three in the morning. Sacrifice, they suggested, was not the missing ingredient.
Two other people in the room looked uncomfortable enough that the candidate assumed the round was over — assumed, too, that the outburst had ended any chance of the job. It had not. The recruiter came back to say the panel had been happy with the answers, and would the candidate please come in for a third round?
They did. The first and third interviewers were, by their account, genuinely decent people. It was the middle round that was the outlier — and the outlier, apparently, that counted. The candidate took the invitation to a third round as the last small insult of a process that seemed to have settled something they could not see. Why bother, they asked, when everyone in the room already knows the ending.