Tiara Allen arrived on time to interview for a retail job. Her interviewer didn’t.

She waited for around 40 minutes in a shopping centre while the interviewer’s co-worker called them “two or three times”.

When they finally showed up, Tiara says she was told it was because the meeting wasn’t in the schedule.

She needed work at the time, so took the job when she was offered it, but says she would handle the situation differently now.

“I would not take a job if they took that long,” she says, adding that she believed her treatment during the interview was a sign of how the firm tended to treat staff.

Tiara is far from alone. She is one of many people who spoke to the BBC about their worst job interview experiences after we wrote about the one interview question that leaves you feeling uncomfortable.

While those situations can be hard to deal with in the moment, they can also teach us a lot about the world of work.

During an interview for an assistant at a book publisher in New York, Chas Edwards was asked a question he wasn’t expecting.

“I was asked for my first job if I was a crier,” he recalls.

Thinking the interviewer was being funny, Chas replied that he didn’t cry. He was later told that this was why he got the job.

“Her last assistant had cried – too often, I guess? – and she wanted someone who didn’t cry. So she was being serious and I thought it was a joke,” he says.

It was a bad sign. Chas says it was “a terrible, terrible job with a miserable boss” and while he managed to make it through 13 months there without crying he was “crying inside”.

“I set the world record for working for this person. No-one had ever lasted three months with her before,” he recalls.

Despite all this, Chas says he is in some ways grateful the experience was so awful.

“Because every job since then, even the bad ones, are not that bad,” he says, adding that he can “cry anywhere now”.

Corinne Card also found herself floored when the first question she was asked in an interview for an administrative job was if she liked working with people.

When she replied yes, she was told that the job wouldn’t be for her and the interview ended there.

“I don’t know if it was a deliberate trap. Because who would answer ‘I don’t like working with people’?”

Corinne Mills, joint managing director of Personal Career Management, says that it can be worth asking an interviewer to clarify any weird questions, perhaps by repeating the question back to them.

However, if a line of questioning is really off-putting, she says it can also be a sign of what it’s like to work there, saying that interviews are also about candidates judging the company.

Meanwhile, other questions are not just annoying – they are illegal.

Discrimination against a protected characteristic is against the law, external, meaning an employer cannot treat you less favourably based on your age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage, pregnancy, race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation.

Employment lawyer Roy Magara says that women being asked if they intend on having children in an interview is a “quite common” kind of bias. He says he has also seen a case where an older candidate was told he didn’t get the job after an interview because he didn’t fit the “vibe” of a younger team.

If you think these sorts of biases took place in your interview, Roy says you can send the company a subject access request, external to see how they discussed your application internally.

Worst-case scenarios like these can make interviews feel very difficult, especially considering the control employers have over candidates.

Euan Cameron, co-founder of hiring software Willo, says that even with this power imbalance it’s important not to overthink what an interview is.

“An interview is just a conversation between two people,” he says.

Of course, as in Tiara’s case, it helps when both of those people show up.