Plus: How Not to Stand Out in a Job Interview and Making Rube Goldberg Proud.

How Not to Stand Out in a Job Interview
There are many unique ways to stand out in a job interview, but singing all of your responses to the hiring manager’s questions probably isn’t the best way to nail the job.

Based on a series of interviews with executives, HR managers and working professionals over the years, staffing firm Robert Half recently offered some examples of candidates’ major interview blunders. Among them:

• Candidate sang all of her responses to interview questions;
• Applicant came in for an interview with a cockatoo on his shoulder;
• Interviewee had a jawbreaker in her mouth during the entire interview;
• Candidate said she would really prefer a job offer from the company’s competitor;
• When asked if he had any questions, applicant replied with a knock-knock joke;
• Interviewee handcuffed himself to the desk during the interview;
• Applicant arrived in a cat suit.

“The goal of any interview is to stand out from the other candidates and ultimately land the job, but make sure you stand out for the right reasons,” Rosemary Haefner, VP of human resources for CareerBuilder.com, recommended earlier this year.

Rube Goldberg Would be Proud
It may not beat OK Go’s last year, but 2D Photography has created a pretty great Rube Goldberg contraption, mostly out of photo equipment, to take two portraits.

This particular run took them 99 takes to achieve:

Here’s a bit about the 2D Rube:

Rude in the Workplace
There’s a 50 percent chance your coworkers think you have bad manners, according to a recent Monster.com survey. The online job-search resource asked its website visitors to rate their colleagues’ manners, and 26 percent answered “Downright rude!”

Coworkers’ behaviors that bothered people the most were:

• Coworkers who gossip (35 percent);
• Coworkers who don’t clean up after themselves (25 percent);
• Coworkers who are too loud (14 percent); and
• Coworkers who text or e-mail when they’re in meetings (10 percent).

No matter what workplace, there’s no shortage of things that irritate us on the job, and in some cases, a single annoyance can ruin an entire day. But the major sources of irritation sometimes pale in comparison to the small, day-to-day nuisances that come from our coworkers.

What rude coworker behaviors could you do without the most? Let us know in the Comments section below.

Cheers.