Sal Governale Delivers a Cringeworthy Performance in His Mock Job Interview

Plus, the Stern Show staffer makes a hilarious attempt at pronouncing “statistician”

December 5, 2018

If his recent mock job interview is any indication, Sal Governale better hope Howard doesn’t retire anytime soon. The Stern Show staffer recently sat down with the executive director of a Fortune 500 company who agreed to assess his potential as a job candidate, and the results left his co-workers in shock.

“No one has ever done a worse job interview,” Howard told listeners on Wednesday. “If I was going to put it in any kind of summation: Sal overshared a lot.”

From the very first question, Sal seemingly didn’t know where to draw the line. Asked simply to introduce himself, Sal began by telling the HR specialist he was a father of three, has worked for the Stern Show for 12 years, and had previously been a stockbroker. But then he took a left turn. “I’ve had my ups and downs in my marriage, but fortunately it’s very good now and I’m in a good place,” he said.

Robin Quivers was baffled and wondered if Sal realized this was a job interview as opposed to a therapy session.

As the questioning went on, Sal continued to be honest to a fault, even recalling in detail a time he crossed the line in touching Howard’s megaphone without permission in addition to mentioning the frequency with which Howard has been angry at him.

The interview got particularly cringeworthy, though, when Sal was asked if he has ever done anything which would lead his co-workers to think he was a pervert.

“There’s a lot of pornography that’s been discussed on the show so, like, we might talk about the particular type of pornography we like,” Sal explained. “And I’ve discussed in the past, I’ve liked, it’s called piss porn … it’s popular in Germany.”

Howard couldn’t believe his ears, but still, this wasn’t even the most jaw-dropping clip.

“If you think about the person that likes you the least, what do you think they would say about you?” the interviewer asked next.

“Oh, probably, like, I’m a racist, they would say. They would probably say I’m a pervert. They would say I’m a creep. They would say that I’m crazy. They would say that I’m an idiot,” Sal replied without hesitation.

Taken aback, the interviewer further questioned why they would think that.

“Because they only hear what I say,” Sal told her. “People might judge me … and that’s fine because they only know what they hear.”

Listening to his answers back, even Sal admitted he probably wouldn’t hire himself. In fact, he even came up blank when the interviewer asked him to summarize why she should hire him.

First, he tried to turn the question back around on her. “Let me ask you, why should you hire me?” he asked.

And when that didn’t work, he fumbled again. “Why should you hire me? Um, I mean, you answer 30 questions, top to bottom, and then you have to sum it up on why you should hire me,” he said. “The thing is that it’s kind of an odd question because I would think at this point you would know if you want to hire me or not. I think I’ve said enough.”

While he initially rated his performance in the interview at an 8, Sal conceded he would have to downgrade it. “Now that I’ve heard it back and you’ve given me advice, if I had to do it again I would probably get an 8 out of 10, but this one probably … I guess a 3 or 4,” he told Howard.

Nonetheless, Sal remained satisfied with one aspect of his performance. “I’m proud of the fact that I was honest,” he maintained. “I always think that if you’re not honest, you come off as disingenuous and people can read that.”

If nothing else, Sal can be glad there was not a speech test during the interview as Howard also debuted a new game to see if listeners could guess which English words Sal would be unable to pronounce. While he butchered quite a few, his pronunciation of “statistician” left the entire studio in hysterics. Watch his attempt (below):