Friday, October 31, 2014

The Most Useless Question

It should come as no surprise to my readers (assuming I have readers) that I’ve been through enough job interviews to have formed a complete set of opinions about interviewers – or their Human Resources departments, at least – based on the standard questions they ask the applicants. I’m not going to deny that standard questions are important, or that most companies have a list of them – it is difficult to compare the answers a set of applicants give you if you don’t ask them all the same questions, and who’s even mentioned the accusations of bigotry (because you asked some applicants different questions than others!) yet? But there are good questions and bad questions, and some are worse than others…

First of all, any question that has been considered an industry standard for decades is probably a bad idea. Enter the question “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” into Google, just to take the obvious example, and you will get 2,110,000 hits (as of this writing), including hundreds (probably thousands) of possible replies for that question and detailed instructions on how to use them, when to use them, how to tell which one your interviewer would most like to see, when to be modest, when to be honest, when to try turning the weakness into another strength, and when to simply lie through your teeth. If you look in the right places online, you should be able to find the fifty or so most asked interview questions, and complete explanations of how each one works and how to answer it, in a matter of minutes. And there’s no real motivation for any job applicant not to do exactly that…

Unlike a factual question, this sort of inquiry calls for a personal opinion, and while lying about the facts can be a crime under some conditions (e.g. perjury), being conceited, arrogant or delusional in your opinions about yourself generally isn’t. Even worse, though, are the questions that have virtually no chance of providing you with any useful information or insights even if they are answered candidly. In her column on the Forbes website, Maureen Henderson make a strong case for the “Most Useless Job Interview Question There Is” being that evergreen favorite, “Where do you see yourself in the next 5/10/20 years?” As Ms. Henderson correctly notes, most people couldn’t answer that question if they wanted to, given the literally unknowable nature of events that haven’t happened yet. Moreover, the average person would be thinking about more than just what job they’re going to have in five years; if they answered the question honestly they’d probably be telling you about their personal life, family, plans for retirement, or many other things that have no bearing on whether or not they would make a good addition to your staff…

Now, I don’t mean to imply that screening applicants and identifying the best choices for specific jobs is easy, or that the questions that will help you make that determination are obvious and easy to formulate. But depending on how dynamic your industry happens to be, it may not be possible to say with any confidence what positions will even exist in five or ten years, let alone whether any particular candidate would be qualified to do them. Which means that even if your applicant tries to answer this question honestly, and even if they manage to limit the answer to things that directly relate to your company and their prospective job, the answer they give you is still likely to be meaningless…

In the long run, you’re probably better off putting together technical questions about job issues, problems the applicant might have to solve on their new job, conflicts they were able to resolve on their last job, or details about their professional knowledge and training. You could have them tell you about some accomplishment of which they are proud, the circumstances that lead them into their current career path, their favorite school subjects or on-the-job training programs, or their personal/professional preferences in computers, equipment, cell phones, consumer electronics, cars, airlines, hotels, restaurants, clothing brands, retail stores, furniture, decorations, family pets, retirement planning strategies, or anything else that might give you some insight into what they would be like to work with and whether or not they would be useful to the company going forward…

You might not anything useful out of these questions, either. But at least you’re less likely to get some generic (and useless) response that some HR expert wrote down and posted on to the Internet ages ago…

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