Let’s say you’ve gotten to the interview stage of your job search, and five minutes into the conversation you realize that this particular job won’t be a good fit for you after all.
Can you end the job interview early?
According to Ask a Manager’s Alison Green, it is possible to walk out of a job interview—especially if you’re in a situation where the interviewer is unexpectedly rude or the job itself is not what was advertised. As Green explains, in Slate:
While employers are assessing candidates, those candidates should be assessing the employers right back, forming their own judgments about whether they’d want to work for this particular company and this particular manager. And just as an employer might choose to cut short an interview if a candidate clearly isn’t right for the job, candidates should feel free to do the same on their side.
But there’s a difference between walking out of an interview where the other party behaves egregiously (Green gives an example of a person arriving for what they thought was a one-on-one meeting to learn that they would be part of a 45-person group interview) and politely ending an interview when you realize the job is not what you are looking for.
