An boss' so-called "salt and pepper test" has gone viral on social media after one of their employees revealed they wouldn't hire any candidate who failed it.
Job interviews can be nerve-wracking experiences at the best of times - so how would you feel if you were being judged on more than just the answers to your questions?
And I'm not even talking about your interview attire or manners - I'm talking about the way you eat a meal.
One employee took to Reddit to reveal that one of their bosses would often perform a certain test when it came to interviewing hopefuls for open roles.
They shared that their employer put candidates through a "Salt and Pepper test," which they believed helped highlight a person’s character.
“A company I used to work for does all-day interviews with multiple people, and one of them is always a lunch interview," they wrote on the platform, per The Mirror.
“I heard about a guy who would base his entire decision on one thing - whether or not the person he was interviewing tried their food before reaching for salt, pepper, hot sauce, etc," they continued. "If you didn't try your food first, you didn't get a pass from him."
While the user wasn't sure why his manager put so much trust into this examination, he believes it must show whether an employee is willing to try something before judging it.
"Glad I didn't interview with him because I pretty much always add pepper to stuff," he added.
The manager isn't the only one who conducts nonsensical tests during a job interview, as Trent Innes, the former boss of Xero Australia, revealed that he also refuses to hire anyone who fails his "coffee cup test".
Innes explained that the examination showed more about a person's integrity than any interview question possibly could.
He opened up about this during an interview on the business podcast The Venture, stating: "I will always take you for a walk down to one of our kitchens and somehow you always end up walking away with a drink," cited by The Mirror.
"Then we take that back, have our interview, and one of the things I'm always looking for at the end of the interview is, does the person doing the interview want to take that empty cup back to the kitchen?" he continued.
You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge and experience but it really does come down to attitude, and the attitude that we talk a lot about is the concept of 'wash your coffee cup,'" Innes said, adding that the trick works since the kitchens in the office are always very clean.
"If you come into the office one day inside Xero, you'll see the kitchens are almost always clean and sparkling and it's very much of that concept of washing your coffee cup. It's really just making sure that they're actually going to fit into the culture inside Xero, and really take on everything that they should be doing," he concluded.
What do you guys think about the odd interview approach?
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