As a young man I attended two separate job interviews; one with Kerry Gold Dairies and the other with a space advertising agency. I was doing okay when out of the blue the bloke interviewing me started being offensive. 'Call yourself a salesman . . . . can you spell it?" and the other one, "What on earth makes you think YOU can do this job.....?'
I stood my ground and gave as good as I got - but, I didn't get either of the jobs.
But I moved on to other sales positions were the interviewers were less confrontational. And didn't we all do well? In one sales job I doubled their customer portfolio before I moved on. At the next sales job I was so good they stopped giving incentives because I always won it.
Only afterwards did I learn that one interviewing technique (for sales positions at least) is to be offensive to see how the applicant reacts. If they react bady, as I did, they would react badly to a customer's irritation. So, no job offered. I should have been more conciliatory (or lickspittle, you choose).
But like I say they lost a recruit who in the decades that followed proved that they were the losers, not me. Some technique eh? I wonder if they still use it.
PS Have never touched a Kerry Gold product since.

A good interviewer will try and catch his candidates off balance. As you say, it's testing their reactions.

Just look at 'The Apprentice'. Look at the grilling and ridiculing that Sir Alan Sugar gives the contenders. He's seeing how well they respond to it, and whether they raise their game and learn or take offence and are put off.

Seems you did alright in the long run, but I'm guessing you were an exception rather than the rule. Nice to hear your success at work was recognised and rewarded though - I think it's important for employers to recognise outstanding skills of individuals rather than just teams.

When I graduated in 1992 there was serious competition for jobs. I initially tried boycotting everyone who rejected my application till basic living became impractical. One particularly daft question hapenned when i went for a management trainee interview at Sainsburys, they asked how I'd copewith living so far away from home if not given a local store, even though I was living 200 miles away already.

The one that infuriated me the most was in applying for a job driving a bakery van. Had I been older and wiser I would have told him to stuff the job but when you're young.
He had a questionaire in front of him and it was innocuous enough to begin with; family circumstances, school . . . but it slowly descended into totally irrelevant questions and some of them quite personal and intrusive, for a job interview. For goodness sake, this was a job as a van driver for a bakery.
The questions were really prying and at the end of it I felt like I had been stripped naked and examined. I never got the job but they had all that information on me! I hope that time has put an end to that kind of practice.
Again, ironically I got a job at a rival firm and was one of the best workers they ever had. I am not boasting. Nothing to boast about. Just illustrating, as you have the appalling stupidity behind these interviewing gimmicks.