How to Handle Bad Interviewers

Some interviewers are just plain bad at their job and unfortunately, you don't get to pick who shows up on the other side of the table. Here's some tips for getting through it.

Ever walked out of a supposedly “standard” interview wondering if you just got mugged? One of the toughest parts about running Hello Interview is hearing from strong candidates who got stuck with interviewers who had no business running the room. Sure, some folks blame the interviewer to dodge their own shortcomings, but plenty of legit candidates crash into the wall of inexperience, ego, or plain nonsense questions.

Interviewer quality lives on a wide spectrum. Some train, take notes, and actually root for you. They’re objective and fair. Others run the show on vibes and fall into power trips. This isn’t always their fault—many companies treat interviewing like a chore and expect folks to just figure it out as they go. The problem? Even if the interviewer is a quick learner, they’re using your interview as their training wheels. Gross.

You can’t control who shows up, but you can be ready for whatever happens. Here’s why interviews sometimes go bad and what you should do when things head south.

Why interviews sometimes go bad

Most bad interviews boil down to the interviewer’s training (or lack thereof) and their attitude. Understanding what’s happening helps you adjust on the fly.

Ego

Some interviewers are insecure. It’s just life, but it snowballs in interviews. When you’re sitting across from someone who’s clearly better than you and you’re already feeling pressure at work, the ego kicks in. One of the nastiest moves? Subtly sabotaging the candidate to feel better about yourself. This happens way more often than it should. (Yes, candidates also blame interviewers for their own poor performance, but that’s a different issue.)

Most people aren’t complete jerks. But if the interviewer makes a sneer or drops a snide remark, that’s your signal to course correct.

Many years ago when I was a junior I spoke with an interviewer colleague at Amazon who was overly fond of rejecting Google candidates, “they can’t meet our bar” he’d tell me “they may earn a lot, [but their work is not up to par]”. Frankly, it was hogwash.

The truth is probably that this person was either rejected by Google or wishes he had been paid as much as Google was paying at the time. They were disrupting the process by rejecting qualified candidates. Worse, it’s politically expensive to try to fix behaviors like this. Attempts to counter this look like “lowering the bar” or “accepting lower quality candidates”. Tricky!

Inexperience or Lack of Preparedness

Lots of interviewers are just inexperienced or underprepared. Interviews are tough to run well. The best interviewers treat it like a craft and keep sharpening their skills. The rest? They wing it and give you a suboptimal experience.

Here’s what makes it hard:

• Coding interviews: They’re reasoning about your code, spotting errors, building an assessment, and asking questions all at once. Lots to juggle.

• Design interviews: Candidates can go in any direction. Interviewers need a deep toolkit of tech and approaches to understand what you’re proposing, plus they need to think ahead to challenges and deep dives to keep the conversation moving.

• Behavioral interviews: They’re probing your carefully constructed stories to see what’s actually going on. Good interviewers won’t let you drone on—they’ll insert questions that reveal the truth. Interrogation is hard and messy.

On top of all that, they’re taking notes and accumulating enough signal to justify their hire/no-hire call. If you haven’t done this before, it’s easy to drop the ball.

Poor Training

Training is expensive, but it pays off. Most companies just don’t invest enough.

Some interviewing techniques have been proven ineffective, yet many companies never tell their interviewers what to do instead. Think contrived questions like “what’s your morning routine?” or riddle questions that test whether you luck into a solution rather than showing your actual thinking.

Interviewers do this because no one’s told them differently. The deeper problem? Evaluating interview effectiveness is messy and full of bias. There’s no gold standard for how interviews must work, but good companies assemble best practices to guide their interviewers.

Good training helps interviewers structure sessions and shortens the ramp-up time, so candidates don’t suffer through rookie mistakes. Things like time management can be taught, especially when seasoned interviewers shadow and give feedback.

New interviewers routinely struggle with time management. If they’ve got a meeting at 4pm and your interview is running over, guess who’s going to be the one to get cut off?

Many interviewers will ask if you have any questions before they get started. One of the easiest things to do is to clarify the time expectations at the start of the interview. Keep a clock next to your screen (or use a watch if you’re in-person) so you can ensure you’re covering what you need to cover!

How to Respond When Things Go Bad

So a lot can go wrong. That’s the reality. But here’s the practical part: what do you do to maximize your chances when your interviewer isn’t doing a good job?

Avoid Ego Battles

First, Drop the need to win the argument. Engineers love being right. I do too. Unfortunately, jousting with a defensive interviewer rarely ends with an offer. If a conversation turns into a logic battle, take the off-ramp. “Sounds good, let me walk you through how I’d approach that way.”“ You’re there to get hired, not to fix their worldview.

Along these lines, avoid religious conversations when you can. Love microservices? Hate monoliths? Great! Save it for after you’re hired. The worst case scenario is you bring up a contentious topic and the interviewer uses it to justify not hiring you.

This doesn’t mean backing away from all challenges. Watch your interviewer’s body language and tone. If their face snarls or their lip pouts, they’re sending you a signal (intentional or not) that you need to respond to.

Especially for junior candidates, some interviewers will challenge answers that are obviously right. In these cases, they just want to see that you know what you’re talking about and can justify it. Be careful of reversing course here!

Help Guide the Conversation

Interviews are a two-way street, no matter how chaotic they feel. Sometimes your interviewer drives (behavioral), sometimes you drive (design). Either way, you have way more latitude in guiding the conversation than you think.

One useful technique: offer a short menu. “I can talk about untangling a gnarly tech-debt mess or how we pushed through marketing resistance—what’s more helpful?” or “There’s a lot here. I’ll dig into alerting and data retention unless you’d rather keep optimizing performance.” That gentle framing makes you look organized and lets the interviewer relax.

Don’t overdo it. Candidates who constantly ask “is this ok?” come across as inexperienced. If you’re always seeking approval, the interviewer will think you’re “target seeking” rather than giving them a real assessment of you. Read the room.

Be Disarmingly Real

Panic turns plenty of candidates into robots who regurgitate scripts and memorized frameworks. When interviewers sense this, they get more confrontational. One of the worst outcomes for an interviewer is evaluating your script rather than you. Many will pivot way too hard when this happens.

The key is being disarmingly real. Treat it like whiteboarding with a teammate or grabbing lunch with a new friend. Stay curious, ask questions, let your sense of humor show up. These small things create a vibe that lets the interviewer relax and be more objective. Bonus: many companies directly evaluate authenticity and communication skills in the interview.

Narrate Your Thinking

When the interviewer is sloppy, clarity is your best defense. Give them a window into why you’re making each decision. “I’m leaning on a write-through cache here because I want fresher reads, but if you care more about availability we can flip to write-back.”

Grumpy interviewers will sometimes treat their lack of comprehension as your problem, so narrating what your brain is doing helps them follow along.

Manage Your Own Time

You’ll almost always have a schedule published beforehand. Keep track of your own time and ask the interviewer if you feel like things are running long. “I know we have about 15 minutes left, did you want me to keep drilling here or should we move on to discussing the tradeoffs?” is an excellent way to unstick and interviewer who otherwise might rush you through those final steps.

Managing the aftermath

You finish the call, close your laptop, and want to throw something. Before you do, jot down a few notes while the details are fresh. What went sideways? Where did you keep your composure? Try to be objective. Is there an explanation for the interviewer’s behavior that might make sense from a different angle?

This reflection helps you improve your interview skills, and it can be helpful if the interview really was a dud. If the experience was truly rough—biased comments, hostile behavior—loop in your recruiter. Keep it factual, not ranty. “Just a heads-up: the interviewer asked several questions about my family schedule and suggested I might struggle with a heavy workload. Wanted to flag this because I know you wouldn’t want to consider this in the evaluation.” Good recruiting partners appreciate the feedback, and sometimes they’ll offer a redo with someone competent.

Then decompress. Go outside. Call the friend who reminds you you’re good at this. Queue up a practice round with a supportive peer to shake off the funk. You want to show up to the next interview without carrying someone else’s bad day.

Bring it back to you

Bad interviewers aren’t going away, but they don’t have to wreck your run. Keep your ego in check, steer the conversation when the other person won’t, and stay human. That combo gets you through the nonsense so the next interviewer sees the version of you that deserves the offer.

And when you do meet a stellar interviewer? Take notes on what made them great so you can borrow those moves the next time you’re on the asking end of the table. The ecosystem gets better when we carry the good habits forward and refuse to repeat the bad ones.