Anyone who conducts video calls knows just how perilous they can be at the best of times, with attendees not muting themselves, or Wi-Fi connections cutting out. But one man has gone viral after revealing the shocking way in which a candidate attended their remote job interview.
Aidan Cramer, founder of the website AIApply.com, has been holding video interviews to fill a customer-support role in his company. While many of them have been positive, one particular call earlier this month with a candidate certainly didn’t go as planned.
Cramer, from London, in the U.K., told Newsweek that this was the first time he had spoken to this woman, having had no prior phone calls or chats with her. So, she certainly made an interesting first impression when she logged onto the call with a novelty filter obscuring her entire face.
This wasn’t just any old filter that removes imperfections or blurs the background. It was much worse, as the filter appeared to show her face as an egg on the screen, with her eyes as yolks.
“When I first saw the filter on her screen, I thought it was a prank,” Cramer said. “She didn’t remove the filter, so I ultimately stopped the call.”
Indeed, at one point early in the call, Cramer told the candidate that she needed to remove the animation because “it’s not very professional.” Many people might swiftly remove the filter and apologize, but not this person, who said she wasn’t feeling great and offered to try a different animation instead.
The candidate switched to a filter that covered her face with strawberries, and then asked Cramer, “Is this better?”
As a result, Cramer stopped the call shortly after as it was clear the woman wasn’t taking it seriously. He hasn’t had any further communication with the interview candidate since.
The founder of AIApply, a software company building AI tools to help jobseekers find employment, shared footage from the video call on his TikTok account (@aidancramer). The caption alongside the clip reads: “She showed up to a job interview like this.”
In the days since the clip was posted, it has gone viral with over 750,000 views and more than 28,000 likes on TikTok at the time of writing.
Cramer wasn’t expecting his video to generate so much attention, but he has been fascinated by the mixed reaction online.
Cramer told Newsweek: “Some people were shocked that she did it in the first place, and others challenged me as to why I had such an issue with it. But we spend all our time trying to help jobseekers at AIApply, so it’s shocking that this stuff happens.”
With over 1,200 comments on the viral TikTok video so far, many social-media users were appalled by the candidate’s behavior during a job interview, while others didn’t want to believe it was real.
One comment reads: “Why would she even risk doing this? Yes do this in meetings or team chats, not an interview.”
Another TikTok user wrote: “This is so Gen Z.”
A third person joked: “This is the kind of staff you want in the office, you lost out here.”
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