Kuleema (@kuleeeema), an Atlanta-area content creator, says she applied to bartend on a hunch—”How hard could it be?”—claimed experience she didn’t have, and, by her own account, talked her way into a second-round callback on the strength of drinks she once mixed in a college dorm.
How did she ace her job interview?
“I have no issue being a personality hire,” Kuleema announces at the top of the clip, with characteristic bravado. Her logic is disarmingly simple: “If boys could do it,” she says, “can’t be that hard.”
So she applied—and, by her telling, listed experience earned from “a couple drinks in the dorm room” at 21. The interview became a rapid-fire quiz. Asked her favorite cocktail, she reeled off a French 75 and a Blue Motorcycle, rattling off their liquors like a spec sheet. An old-fashioned? Covered. Two domestic beers, two imports? Budweiser, Bud Light, Corona—and a Modelo she reached for on a garbled guess.
Margarita ratios? No problem, well, close enough. She was locked in.
Then came the Long Island iced tea, a cheapie classic. “This is where I fumbled,” she admits—she’d never ordered one, never watched anyone order one. Wines she salvaged with Olive Garden muscle memory, pairing whites with lighter dishes and reds with red meat, before defaulting on red varietals to a sheepish “sweet red.”
Still, she claims the interviewer was sold. But she offers no evidence or any follow-up. She recalled him asking whether she’d really never done this before. Her actual credential, she jokes, was years of diligent “research” at the bar. “I was literally setting up the plan,” she says.
Viewers were amazed
“Wait it’s this easy?!!! My man be drinking gin old fashioned and me tequila manhattans and or a pinot or savy or a red blend lol,” joked one commenter.
“Hey girlie fellow bartender here you did a good job!” one person said. “I would say starting now at least know 7 basic cocktails and at least three brands of each liquor types.. like tequila – Don Julio, Casa, Espolon. But good luckkkk!”
The ‘It’ Factor
The “personality hire”—the colleague brought on for charisma over credentials—became a trending TikTok fixation in 2024, equal parts self-deprecating meme plus a subtle defense of soft skills. Vicki Salemi, a career expert at Monster, described such hires as having “the ‘it’ factor”—the capacity for smoothing tense rooms and lifting a team’s mood.
Employers sometimes buy in. Steven Bartlett, the “Diary of a CEO” founder, said in January he once hired a candidate with almost no work experience because, before the interview even began, she “thanked the security guard by name.” Character closed it, not the résumé.
Subplot reached out to Kuleema (@kuleeeema) and Vicki Salemi, an expert at Monster, via email.
