Stupid Interview Questions: 6 Take-Aways

There is nothing worse than getting to the end of an interview with a candidate, being fresh out of questions, and still not having a clue as to whether you should make the hire or not. Fortunately, there are plenty of places to find good questions, and even off-beat questions (e.g.—“How fast does your hair grow in miles per hour?”) if you discover that your interviews really are not yielding decent information.

In the course of developing good questions, I came across Liz Ryan’s article, Stupid Interview Questions, in Business Week a few years ago.

Here are her five stupid questions and six related take-aways:

1. Where do you see yourself in five years?

This is the great-granddaddy of goofy questions, and I give you permission, if you have any misgivings about a job opportunity, to walk out the door when you hear it. It's such a time-waster that only the most hidebound interviewers will utter it, but it lives on. Here's why it's dumb. No company will guarantee you a job for five years, much less a career path. To construct such a plan for yourself, you'd have to make predictions about industries, companies, and your likes and dislikes that could only serve to constrain your choices. And in any case, why is it so all-fired important to have a dang career plan in mind? Every successful entrepreneur and many top corporate people will tell you their key to success: I did what I felt driven to do at the moment.

2. If you were an animal/a can of soup/some other random object, which one would you be?

This is a question typically asked of new grads, because it's considered cute. It's supposed to test how people think. But it's asinine. You can pretend to think about your answer for a moment (eyes to the ceiling, chin resting on hand) and then come up with something. Or stare blankly at the interviewer and say, deadpan: "Are you serious?"

[Ed. Note: My suggestion is, “Whichever animal is at the top of the food chain.” Or, “The soup at eye-level on the grocer’s shelf.” Then you can talk about survival of the fittest and how FIFO keeps inventory circulating. If you should use these answers, please let me know how it goes.]

3. What are your weaknesses?

By now, such a large percentage of the job-seeking public has gotten clued in on the politically correct answer to this one -- which is, "I'm a hopeless workaholic" -- that the question's utility is limited. But it's also offensive. This is a job interview, not a psychological exam. It's one thing for an interviewer to ask you what you do particularly well. It's another thing to ask what you don't do well and expect to get a forthright answer -- in a context where it's clear to both parties that you're being weeded in or out. The most honest answer might be this: "That's for me to know and you to find out." But that won't help your chances.

4. What in particular interested you about our company?

Now, on one level this is a reasonable question. If you say: "I'm interested in this job because it's three blocks from my apartment," you might not be the world's best candidate. But the disingenuous, and therefore offensive, aspect of this question is that it assumes that you have unlimited job opportunities and have pinpointed this one because of some dazzling aspect of the role or the company. I mean, please. Most of the job-seeking population is living on the lower two-thirds of Maslow's pyramid, where the most appealing thing about any job is that you got the darned interview. Why am I interested? Because you guys called me back.

5. What would your past managers say about you?

This is a fine question, but it's not a true interview question. It's an intelligence question. It's like the question on one of those "honesty" tests that are becoming more and more popular in the hiring process (to add insult to injury, they're often called Personality Profiles): "Do you think it's O.K. to steal from your employer?"

These are intelligence questions because you have to have the intelligence to know the answer in order to be smart enough to go and get a job. The trick here is to say something sufficiently witty or pithy to make you stand out from the crowd, because the standard answers are so tired: My managers would say that I'm hard-working, loyal, reliable, and a great team player. Snoozeville.

6. The secret of good job interviewers is that they never ask traditional, dorky interview questions. They don't need to. They jump into a business conversation that does three powerful things in a one-hour chat:

a) Gets you excited about this opportunity (or, as valuably, makes it clear that you and this job are not a good fit)

b) Reveals to the interviewer how you'll fit into the role and the company, based on your background, perspective, temperament, and ideas

c) Gives you a ton of new information about the job, the management, the goals, the culture, and what life at this joint would be like.

If any of this doesn't happen, it's a problem.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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