As a job searcher, I’ve joined a lot of jobs boards and employment sites. One of them recently sent an e-mail with a link to an article “The Seven Stupidest Interview Questions and What They Really Mean.”
This is just the kind of thing that tends to stump adults with ADD. It’s one of those social situations with unwritten rules, where everyone else seems to know what’s going on, and we don’t. Interviewing for a job can be like navigating a mine field for someone like me — I need to accurately parse the question, and the subtext of the question, and THEN I need to answer it without going off on a tangent.
It turns out that there are reasons why interviewers ask seemingly dumb questions. For instance, according to this article, “tell me about yourself” is often about testing your ability to interact with others (*gulp*). “What’s your greatest weakness” is not about determining what your weaknesses are, but whether you can overcome them.
So now I know why they ask all those stupid questions … but how do I answer them? Before my last interview I looked for advice in that area, and I felt like this article from the aptly-named “jobinterviewquestions.org” provided some useful advice — specific answers to 50 questions you might encounter in an interview. For example, to answer the question “what qualities do you look for in a boss”, they advise: “Be generic and positive. Safe qualities are knowledgeable, a sense of humor, fair, loyal to subordinates and holder of high standards. All bosses think they have these traits.”
Yup. That’s straight talk.
My sister once got asked what character from Friends she’d be, during her graduate jobs hunt. Her answer was something along the lines of “never watched it, never will, how is this relevant?”.
She didn’t get that one, needless to say but she was happily employed a few months later with a company that kept the stupid questions to a minimum.
If you really have to ask those “personality insight” questions, make it open-ended enough so that every candidate can just pick something at random and waffle around it. It’s not a good idea to assume that everyone’s going to be familiar enough with a franchise to pick out a character and compare them with their own personality.