A potential candidate I'm interested in (for a junior analyst role, 3-5 years experience) went through a panel interview today. Before the panel, I went through a technical screen with her, and she did fairly well and could express her thoughts/rationale clearly (unless some other folks, who immediately resorted to Chat GPT). There were 3 people on this panel--a senior director and two managers. The senior director is very terse, direct, and a fast-talker--he has reputation for being somewhat intimidating but smart.

Long story short, she started crying during the interview and could not recover. However, I was put off by the way the senior director interviewed her. Here's a snippet of a conversation within the first 5 minutes:

"How would you rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 in Excel?"

"A 9, but I don't know macros."

"Oh wow, that sounds you're more like a 5 than a 9, don't you think?"

"Um."

"Okay lets pivot to SQL. Can you define what window functions are, and what fixed level calculations are?"

"Um, I don't know how to define that for you right off the bat."

"Those are pretty basic SQL concepts. Ok. It says you also have here you have Python on your resume"

"Yes, that was school experience."

"I wouldn't put that on your work resume if you have no practical experience."

The two senior managers continued to ask her questions as well, and didn't stop to ask her for a break. What would you all do? Crying seems like a death sentence but at the same time, I did not like how the panel went about the whole thing.