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…
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