Reason why boss uses crucial coffee cup test in every interview and refuses to hire anyone who fails

Navigating the etiquette of interviews feels like an interview all on its own.

From making sure you're not too early (but never late) to deciding what to wear, the awkwardness of a handshake to following-up if you don't hear back, you can see why so many people are trying to leave the corporate rat race behind.

If all of that wasn't enough to deal with, you've then got interviewers bombarding you with secret tasks and hidden missions that could decide whether you're the perfect candidate for the job.

We already covered the guy who used a bamboozling brain teaser to decide whether his interviewees were enough of a 'genius' to join his team, but have you ever heard of the coffee cup test? If not, chances are you won't be getting a job with businessman Trent Innes.

Innes tricks interviewees with a coffee cup test, and if they fail, they're out the door. Speaking to business podcast The Ventures, Innes explained: "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."

As well forcing nervous interviewees into taking a drink they might not want, Innes then observes them like some sadistic scientist in a lab.

While you might be rightly questioning how having a drink can decide your future, Innes continued: "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?"

The whole thing falls apart if you're too polite to accept a drink, although Innes makes it sounds like he's pretty persuasive.

According to him, the test is to decide whether you're a team player in terms of kitchen duties: "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 runs a tight ship, concluding: "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 off that concept of wash 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."

When Innes methods were shared in a viral TikTok, you can imagine how well it went down. Mainly, people accused him of playing mind games.

One person said: "So he uses his power and privilege to do small tests on vulnerable people searching for employment?"

Another joked, "After the interview, I surveil them until they go to the grocery store. I then observe if they return their buggy 🤨," and a third said, "Joke's on him, I'm not drinking out of a communal coffee cup."

We'll be honest here, we're often too busy thinking about the actual interview to worry about whether we've left a cup behind on the desk, but thanks to Innes, we're sure thousands of people will now lie awake at night while wondering whether they took that cup back to the kitchen.