I don’t argue well. I tend to lose my bearings when things get confrontational.
I don’t do much socializing with co-workers outside the office.
I believe in presenting a unified face to clients (think Godfather: “never argue in front of a client” and “never take sides against the company”), and believe that not doing so is equivalent to backstabbing.
You probably shouldn’t email nude pictures of yourself to everyone in the company. It didn’t help the guy who interviewed here a while back.
I think your internal a, b, c answer pretty much nailed it. Answer it that way confidently, and then ask “what’s your real question so I can answer it?”
Well, with your interviewing style you’re going to get sycophants and politicians. Best of luck with that.
When I’m greeted with aggressive interviewing tactics and obvious attempts to trap the interviewee, I quickly cut the interview short, inform the company that I am not interested in working in such an enviroment, and if it’s particularly repulsive behavior by an HR drone I may inform the would-be supervisor and/or executive of the company of my reaction.
Commonly I will respond to a question of those sort, that is unanswerable questions, with humor. If that’s greeted poorly, I’ll reverse the question until I get a better impression of what the interviewer wants to really know about me. If they seem less interested in my personality and skills than my willingness to bend to their will and provide canned answers my interest in pleasing them disappears.
To be fair, not everyone participating in this thread is looking to work in a consulting firm. The kind of questions you asked may be designed to see how they’d handle a difficult client, but not every interview has that same objective. Some jobs require different skills and the interviews will be different.
I still don’t like the fact that you want to see this choice as a real dilemma. Sorry, it’s not a dilemma for me–and I wouldn’t want a candidate to consider it one. I guess in that area, I would be considered “too rigid” in my thinking. But I would want a candidate that’s rigid in that area.
Sure, I wouldn’t want someone who says they’d tell the client to fuck off. I’d expect most try to tell you everything they’d try to keep the client while avoiding breaking the law. But if you keep pushing it to the point they have to make a choice, I would think you’d want the person who considers this choice an awful position to be in but still one with a clear “right answer.”
I do need to know how a person would deal with difficult clients, but I prefer a question that doesn’t make it sound like we would consider an ethical choice to be a grey area. Something like “You’re working your last day before a long-planned one week vacation when a client calls to tell you that they work they’ve previously approved and you thought was ready to go now needs to be totally reworked. You can’t hand it off to a coworker. What do you do?” (And, no, cancelling the vacation is not always the right answer. There really is no right answer. I ask in order to see their thought process and how they try to work through the situation.)
I should disclose that this “rigidness” may be based on my own experiences. I currently work in an industry that was rocked by scandals a few years ago. My company wasn’t caught up in it because we’ve always had a corporate culture of putting ethics first. When I first interviewed with this company, I got a lot of questions about a previous job (in consulting of all things, although in a rather obscure area–litigation & claims if you’re familiar with that) for a company that had experienced scandals of its own. My current employer was very concerned that I’d worked there. The scandals were in the audit area of the company (no, it wasn’t Enron, it was years before that mess) and I didn’t work in audit at the time. Not only that, but I had been out of that company for more than 5 years. Yet I was still grilled about that. What did I think of it? What caused it? How could I be comfortable working in a corporate culture where such things were tolerated?
I was able to answer the questions well enough to get the job, but that experience really drove home how we are judged by the company we keep. I value my reputation and don’t want it sullied by working somewhere that considers breaking the law to keep a client to be an acceptable choice.
Actually, by asking questions with no clear-cut answer, that helps weed out sycophants who answer what they think I want to hear. But to a certain extent, yes, consultants are expected to be politicians and that’s not a bad thing.
I’ve been doing this long enough and read enough interviewing books to recognize the canned responses. I don’t want to hire based on how well someone studied a “How To Interview for Success” book.
And that’s fine. Our interview process is designed to identify the people who are. It’s a very demanding and challenging environment and the last thing we want is someone who quits after 3 months because it’s not a good fit.
I agree with MaddyStrut. This is not a dilemma; the only answer you should be interested in is a prompt, unambiguous “I will not break the law or compromise my ethics, even at the risk of losing business.” Or is that too “rigid” an attitude for you guys?
From my experience in interviews for IT positions, I think the answers would vary wildly depending on which interview it is:
The headhunter, trying to find out if you’re even in the ballpark for consideration for the job, in which case, he’s an ass for asking it and wasting both of your time. You can bullshit your way past this guy; he wants the interview to end as soon as reasonably possible so he can schedule…
The tech interview, where they’re trying to find out if you really can do the job, in which case you’d have to list eight things that would help you do the work, and eight things that might slow you down if you can’t spin them right (“I’m really tenacious with problems, and will just about kill myself trying to solve something on my own”). You can’t bullshit your way past this guy unless you know more than he does, and, if so, why don’t you have his job?
The manager interview, where they’re trying to find out if you are right for the company. They already know you can do the job; now they’re trying to figure out just how well you fit into the corporate culture. So, you have to come up with eight buzzword fluffy goodness answers for strengths, and eight more buzzword fluffy goodness answers for weaknesses (“sometimes I get so involved in a project that I let my personal life shift down in importance”). This guy lives in bullshit, knows it, and loves it. Feed him bullshit and he’s in bullshit heaven.
