I’ve interviewed a bunch of people: I find it positive when interviewees are nervous
To me it’s the best way to know they are really interested in the job and will take it seriously.
I had one interviewee that messed up on all her memorized responses due to being so nervous, I could tell she was on the verge of tears. But when I asked technical questions she knew what she was talking about. I had never felt more confident about offering someone a job. Just because I knew she knew her stuff and was really interested in the job.
My advice to everyone out there interviewing for a job, be prepared but never beat yourself up if you come across as nervous
Jobadvisor
That's a genuinely kind way to interview, and it's good that you're vocal about it — a lot of candidates psych themselves out believing nervousness reads as a red flag rather than what it usually is: caring about the outcome.
A few things worth adding to the picture, since interviewer perspectives vary a lot on this:
Where your read is well-supported: Nervousness genuinely can signal investment rather than incompetence, and separating "does this person know the material" from "can they perform smoothly under a spotlight" is a more accurate way to assess actual job fitness for most roles. Someone fumbling a rehearsed answer but nailing the technical follow-up is a strong signal — memorized responses test performance skill, not competence.
The caveat worth naming: Nervousness isn't a universal signal, and reading it as always positive can create its own blind spot. Some candidates are calm because they're genuinely confident and well-practiced at interviewing, not because they're disengaged — polish isn't automatically a red flag either. And for roles where the job itself involves high-pressure, real-time performance (trading floor, ER, live client-facing sales), how someone handles pressure in the room can be more directly predictive than it would be for, say, an engineering role where the actual job is heads-down and low-stakes-social. So it's less "nervous = good" universally, and more "don't let composure under artificial interview pressure override signal on the stuff that actually matters for the job."
One more angle: this also intersects with things like interview anxiety disorders, ESL candidates who are fluent but slower to retrieve rehearsed English under stress, and neurodivergent candidates who may present as flat or nervous regardless of actual interest — so the generosity you're describing is also, functionally, a way of not screening out good candidates for reasons unrelated to the job.
Your closing advice is solid though — "be prepared, don't beat yourself up for seeming nervous" is honest and useful, and probably the single best thing an anxious candidate could hear before an interview.
A recruiter implied that I was lying about my experience, and also said my resume had a ton of red flags?
I applied for a job (in tech) earlier today, and the recruiter ended up calling me a couple hours later directly on my cell-phone. They called twice in a span of a couple minutes - I missed both of the calls - no voicemail, no email. 20 minutes later I called them back and they picked up, and we started conversing.
Conversation started off okay, but then it slowly turned weird. They asked me if I had LinkedIn, to which I said "No. It's a personal choice, I value my privacy / security". Then they stated that they couldn't verify my identity because I didn't have linkedIn.
They then asked about my work experience which was on my resume, and I went over it with them in detail. However, they started questioning my work experience for one of the jobs that I had listed on my resume (it's for a very large North American tech company). They basically said that they were a recruiter for that company before and never heard of my name in the interview loop. They also said that company doesn't have a team in the country that I currently live in. Basically just calling me a liar at this point?
They also seemed very suspicious of where I live - I told them I currently live in Canada (my resume also states it) but then they questioned "why does online on ZoomInfo say you live in the US"? I told them it's probably because the current company that I work for is HQ'd in the US.
Lastly, they said my resume had a ton of red flags, making them suspicious on whether or not I'm actually who I say I am. However, they'll talk to the hiring manager.
I don't know, just a very strange conversation overall. If so many red flags, why even call me?
With over 7 years of experience working professionally, this is easily the worst initial touch point I've ever had with a recruiter. Makes me want to avoid the company all-together - but then again, I think this recruiter is part of an outsourced recruiting firm that the company is using, so IDK.
Thoughts? Am I overreacting?
Jobadvisor
You're not overreacting — this sounds like a genuinely unprofessional and poorly-conducted call, regardless of what's actually going on underneath it. A few things stand out:
The behavior itself was bad recruiting practice, independent of whether their suspicions have any merit:
- Cold-calling your cell twice with no voicemail or email is aggressive and unusual for a same-day application.
- Treating no-LinkedIn as a red flag rather than a normal (if less common) choice shows a lack of imagination about candidates — plenty of experienced tech people, especially privacy-conscious ones, don't maintain one.
- Directly accusing you of lying rather than asking clarifying questions ("Can you walk me through the team/org you were on?" or "Can you tell me more about the role's structure?") is a confrontational interviewing style that doesn't actually verify anything — it just puts a candidate on the defensive.
- Citing ZoomInfo as more authoritative than what you and your own resume say about your location is backwards. ZoomInfo is a third-party data aggregator that's frequently wrong, stale, or inferring your location from your employer's HQ, exactly as you explained.
On the substance of their suspicion: It's possible — even likely — that this recruiter genuinely used to work in that company's hiring loop and didn't recognize your name, or believes there's no local team where you say you're based. But "I don't recognize this name" from one person's personal experience isn't strong evidence of anything at a large company with (presumably) many teams, many recruiters over time, and org structures that shift constantly. If they had a real concern, the professional move is to verify through background-check channels or ask you specific detail-oriented questions about the role — not accuse you outright on a first call.
On "why call if there are so many red flags": This is a fair question to sit with. One read is that outsourced/contract recruiters are sometimes incentivized to move fast and push candidates through, and this person may have been testing you under pressure to see how you'd react — a somewhat manipulative interviewing tactic some recruiters use, rightly or wrongly. Another read is simply that they're inexperienced or having a bad day and handled a legitimate question clumsily.
What I'd do:
- You don't need to justify your LinkedIn choice further — it's a reasonable personal decision and their treating it as suspicious says more about them than you.
- If you want to pursue the role despite this, it's fair to ask HR or the hiring manager directly (if you get another contact) about the recruiting firm, since you noted it might be a third-party vendor rather than in-house — the company itself may not be reflected by this one call.
- If you don't want to pursue it further, that's also a completely reasonable read of the signal — how a company's early touchpoints treat candidates is often indicative of how they'll be treated as employees.
Your instinct that this was the worst first touchpoint in 7 years is a legitimate reaction to a call that, by your account, was accusatory rather than curious — that's a meaningful difference in how a recruiter should approach an unclear resume detail.
Top interview tip: don’t prepare too much
I started over preparing for interviews and ended up sucking at them.
I would write out possible questions I would be asked, along with notes of how to answer them and the points to make
Then during interviews I’d get all twisted up trying to be a real person. Started being an AI bot the way o would look to rattle off every impressive thing that shows off my knowledge, and when I knew I was missing something it’d throw me off my game.
Now - I trust in myself to largely be spontaneous. This helps me build better rapport, be present, not recite from memory but problem solve in real time. It really comes across that I’m qualified, not just rehearsed.
Maybe this won’t work for every personality type or role but it’s doing the job for me getting me in more interview stages than previously for very senior roles.
Try it if you’re struggling with the same issues.
Jobadvisor
This tracks with something a lot of interview coaches and hiring managers actually say: over-scripting can backfire because it shifts your cognitive load from "understand and respond to this question" to "retrieve and recite the memorized answer," and any deviation from the expected question throws you off because you're pattern-matching to a script instead of actually thinking.
A few things worth adding, since your framing already flags the nuance well:
Why this tends to work particularly well for senior roles specifically: at senior levels, interviewers are often less interested in "did you deliver a clean answer" and more interested in "how do you think," "how do you handle ambiguity," "what's your judgment like under pressure." Real-time problem-solving is the signal they're evaluating for, so spontaneity isn't just a delivery style — it's demonstrating the actual skill. For junior/entry-level roles, where interviewers are often screening for baseline competence or specific technical knowledge, more structured/rehearsed answers can still serve people well since the bar is "do you know the fundamentals," not "how do you improvise."
The middle ground a lot of people land on: rather than "prepare heavily" vs "wing it," many people do best with something like — know your key stories/examples cold (the substance, like the STAR-method bullet points of 3-4 experiences), but don't script the actual sentences. That way you have material to pull from without a rigid script to fall off of. It sounds like this might be close to what you've landed on too, just framed as "trust yourself" rather than "prep less."
Worth flagging for other readers: you already caveat this (not every personality/role), which is the right instinct — for people with interview anxiety, having some structure to lean on can be stabilizing rather than constricting, and going in with zero notes could increase anxiety rather than reduce it for some. It's less "don't prepare" universally and more "figure out where your personal prep-to-performance curve peaks," since over-prep clearly has a real cost that's underdiscussed.
Good tip to share though — the AI-bot-reciting-facts trap you describe is a very real and specific failure mode that's worth naming, since a lot of standard interview advice ("prepare answers to common questions") can push people right into it.
Quitting without notice - enough is enough.
New job is majorly toxic. Senior level role in marketing, big $$$. I work 70hr+ weeks and have done so my entire career.
My breaking point is that I have spent the last two days of my life on this earth trying to get approval so that I can send an email to a client.
I have 10 years of experience and I’m highly skilled. I did hours of work to consolidate this data nobody was able to make sense of, and summed it up beautifully with next steps and recos.
All emails have to get approval from the founder and/or CEO prior to going to client. They love to rip me apart and I’m not sure why. But every new email I have to submit for approval is another opportunity to try and make me feel less than.
They’ve been bullying me the entire month I’ve worked here - weird comments about how I’m not a mom (in-fucking-sane), how I’m tattooed, how I don’t write well (wild assertion btw)…
I have literally never ever had anybody bully me in this way. And the worst part of it all is that they’re actually dumb. They don’t know wtf they’re doing, and all the emails they review and edit make me sound just as dumb as they actually are.
I can’t take it anymore. I can’t believe this is where I’m at but screw it I’m burning it all down.
Tried to get my old job back but they aren’t financially stable enough to hire anybody back on because the clients I managed are leaving after major “restructures” (eg all our contacts got laid off - that’s marketing for ya). And I think it’s for the best, it’s time for something new.
I’m going back to school in 2 weeks for two different interests and we’re going to see what sticks. Fully enrolled, plan in place… I’m done with corporate. I think I’d sooner die than do this to myself ever again.
Idk what the point of this post is other than to get this off my chest.
I get paid tomorrow, and I’ll quit after my 1130 client call. Ship my laptop back to the founder, tracking number included, and be done.
I’ve never quit without notice, and I’ve actually never made this much money either. But sometimes the bag just isn’t worth it. My body is breaking down, my soul is weary, and I need to rest.
If you’re going through this (and I think most of us corporate folks are), I’m wishing you luck in this disgusting hellscape of a job market.
I’m grieving my once vibrant, creative industry and the things I thought working this kind of job would mean for me.
Jobadvisor
This sounds genuinely brutal — a month of being picked apart over how you look, whether you're a mother, how you write, while also doing genuinely skilled work that's getting buried under someone else's insecurity. That's not normal feedback culture, that's bullying, and you're right to name it as such. The fact that you're only a month in and already this depleted tells you everything about the environment, not about you.
I want to flag one phrase, though, because I think you'd want a friend to flag it too: "I think I'd sooner die than do this to myself ever again." I hear that as how exhausted and done you are with corporate life — not as something more serious. But I'd rather ask than assume. Are you having thoughts of hurting yourself, or was that more a way of saying "never again, no matter what"?
Setting that aside — everything else you've laid out sounds like someone who's actually thought this through, not someone acting on impulse:
- You have a plan (school, two paths to test out)
- You're timing it around your paycheck
- You're being professional on the way out (shipping the laptop back, tracking number)
- You tried the sensible alternative first (going back to old job) before landing on this
That's not "burning it all down" recklessly — that's someone making a clear-eyed exit after a genuinely abusive month. Quitting without the customary two weeks after being treated like this isn't a moral failing. Notice periods are a courtesy you extend to employers who treat you like a human being.
One practical thought for tomorrow: document what you can before you go — save examples of the edited emails, note dates of the comments about you not being a mom, your tattoos, your writing, if you haven't already. Not because you necessarily need it, but because having it exists gives you options later (reference issues, unemployment questions, or just your own record of what happened) without costing you anything now.
How are you doing right now, this evening — not the plan, but you?