When is it OK to lie? What would you do with 100 Christmas trees in July? If you were a cereal, what kind would you be? Knowing that those and other questions await in an employment interview could have a huge impact on a candidate's chances of landing a new job and, beginning on Tuesday, a Web site called Glassdoor.com aims to provide that insight. The online jobs site, which already lists salaries and reviews of companies around the world, is adding interview listings. Using a “give and get” system, users submit their experience anonymously for access to other people's stories. “Interviewing is scary, and the one thing that can help reduce the anxiety of interviewing is information,” said Robert Hohman, chief executive of the Sausalito, California-based company. “It makes you feel more confident.” Reviews of nearly 2,000 job interviews have been collected from more than 1,000 companies, Hohman said. The information lists unexpected or tough questions, rates the difficulty, whether it was positive or negative and whether the interviewee got an offer. For instance, a review by a candidate for a maintenance director post at a senior center run by Brookdale Senior Living in Tucson, Arizona, warned against the job. The company lost his application, and an executive who scheduled an interview with him took that day off, he said. “There are no leadership skills in this corp,” he wrote, adding that he was asked: “What would the inside of my car look like if we were to go look inside of it right now?” The question about cereal was posed in an interview for a financial analyst at Cisco Systems. The companies with the most interview reviews are Microsoft, Apple and Google. PricewaterhouseCoopers got the highest positive rating and Google was rated the most negative interview experience, Glassdoor said.
