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I was trying to think of a way to give a hopeful spin to my friend's unsuccessful job interview outcome and I remembered Bernoulli trials which apply to anything with 2 outcomes like "heads or tails" or "got the job, didn't get the job".
My question is, can you apply this concept to a job interview? And if so, what assumptions/constraints would you have to make in order to do so?
Nice question, in a way, but I'm afraid that the answer is probably going to be "no, you can't apply this to a job interview".
Firstly, to make use of Bernoulli trials you want a sequence of trials. OK, it's possible for the "sequence" to consist of just one trial, but that's generally a very uninteresting case.
You could perhaps look at a geometric distribution which gives the probability of having to make $k$ Bernoulli trials before getting a success. This might be relevant for investigating the likely waiting time before a successful interview. However, for Bernoulli trials, the successive trials must all have the same success probability (unlikely if attending interviews for various jobs), and they must be independent (also seems pretty unlikely I should think - a failure in one trial might very well affect the applicant's chances in future trials). So I feel that you would have to make some very dodgy assumptions before using these ideas, and the results you get would be correspondingly dodgy.
Sorry....
