Yeah if someone said something offensive to me in an interview, I’d want them on the first flight out of town, not stranded at the airport calling me repeatedly.

Maybe they felt “betrayed” in some way if OP performed as bad as he said? Maybe they thought it was some kind of bad joke or OP pretended to have qualification he didn’t actually have.

@Michael Then the company screwed up whatever checks (phone interview etc) they should have done before the in person interview. I don't care if they felt "betrayed", acting like this is just so incredibly unprofessional I can't find language to describe it.

I would think a remark would have to be not merely offensive, but downright literally criminal, for a company to engage in this kind of behavior.

@Kyralessa I'm still finding it hard to think of anything verbal which would cause me to engage in this kind of behaviour. If a candidate actually got into a physical altercation such that I had to call the police then maybe, just maybe.

@Michael even if you have felt all your expectations betrayed, that is no excuse to have a poor (in the sense of performance) candidate screwed out and stranded in an airport. You (the company) invested money in interviewing this candidate, you must fulfil your duty and have him back home. Every suggestion on "phone screening first" is a very good advice for future interviews. The whole matter, if true, sounds like personal revenge against OP.

"Make at least a nominal attempt to reconcile things with the company first." Phoning them until they claim harassment would seem to have already met the criteria for this.

Things could have been worse... Just imagine if you had gotten the job and had to deal with these people on a regular basis. I doubt this kind of decision making is isolated to this situation.

While some people do lie on their resumes I've seen more cases of the recruiter doing the lying when it's going to be that easy to catch.

@Kyralessa That was my thinking as well... My thinking is that if the person is actually arrested and in jail and unable to make their flight - that would practically be the only time this sort of behavior would be acceptable.

@DavidMulder "Whatever happened must have been pretty bad". It is also possible that the people in that company are simply insane.

@DavidMulder A real scenario along those lines could be that the company is legally not permitted to have financial dealings with the interviewee. In particular, the company discovers the interviewee is on a sanctions list and it wasn't detected in advance due to fraud.

@Murphy OP might have spoken to the same person who cancelled their ticket. Maybe if he is able to speak to someone else, he may have a better chance of being refunded.

@Revetahw I meant it in the same sense as "the interview went disastrously", not in the sense that it was the OP's fault. For all I know there was a recruiter in between the company who reached out to the OP despite the OP having a completely wrong profile (that has happened to me both being reached out to and recruiters offering completely mismatched candidates) and the only one bearing responsibility was the recruiter and the company for blaming the guy instead of the recruiter. BUt yeah, just hypotheticals. Point was: we don't know the full story.

@user71659 in that case, you tell the person that's what happened. Not being permitted to have financial dealings with someone is not a pass to lie and treat them like crap.

@user71659 for example if the OP was a senior North Korean government official and the company did not discover it until the interview. I am not aware of the law, but I strongly suspect that this is BS.

@iheanyi Actually in some jurisdictions notifying someone that they are on a fraud/terror financing watchlist is illegal, and the correct (legal) course of action is to simply stop dealing with them (although of course we don't have any evidence suggesting that this is the reason the flight was canceled).

@user71659 Even assuming that, I'm having a hard time finding a situation where cancelling an already purchased return trip ticket wouldn't make things worse. The ticket was already purchased, cancelling it seems more like an additional transaction than simply leaving everything as it was at the time of the discovery. Cancelling also both tips off the individual that something was odd and encourages them to make noise about it publicly.

@TimothyAWiseman Not cancelling the ticket is continuing to provide something of value to the person, even after you know you shouldn't. You're minimizing the amount of sanction violations, where badness is by dollar, not by "transaction"