See, that’s what I dislike about interviews. #2, and I suspect #3, were designed to be consulting case study interviews with a specific purpose in mind: to give a candidate the opportunity to demonstrate how he or she structures and analyzes exercises in problem solving. They’re not stupid: a single case study question will take up most of the alloted interview time, and both candidate and interviewer have a clear idea of what’s going on.
But it sounds like you’re making it into a “if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be” thing.
Same thing with questions drawn from pop psychology (e.g., based on Myers-Briggs Type Indicator): there may once have been a legitimate methodology backing the question, but you can bet dollars to donuts that the HR gatekeeper sitting across from me has no idea what it is and has no qualifications whatsoever to apply it.
Not in the U.S. - however Lust4Life may well not be in the US judging from some turns of phrase (“childminder” is more of a UK phrase than an US, for example). I’ve no clue what the laws are like in other countries.
In the US, it’s definitely illegal - the closest you can come is “the duties are x, y, z, 40% travel is involved and frequent overtime, do you have any issues with being able to commit to such a schedule?”.
THe closest to an oddball question I’ve ever been asked was “do you consider yourself an aggressive person?” (meaning “Go-getter”). I snarled “whaddyou mean by that?!!!” (then inwardly went :eek::smack::smack::smack:). The interview had been going so well! (oddly, I got the job!).
I knew a woman many years back who was asked “do you consider yourself religious?”. WTF???
How would Dopers evaluate the answer, “I’m a very private person and I consider what I do in my own time my own business. As such I (insert relevant comments about confidentiality etc)”?
See, Quartz, I hate it when companies or bosses interfere with my private time, therefore I would never ask that question.
But if I was in a group interview and one of the other interviewers asked it, I’d consider that answer perfectly appropiate. It’s more polite than “none of your fucking business,” which is what I’d really, really like to answer when people ask it.
Honestly, that answer would be held against you as much as just about any answer you could give. You would be better off hunting moose, painting nudes, whatever. From the employer’s position, they really would prefer someone who is a little more giving of himself and willing to be more than an employee. Among other things, an answer like that will be interpreted to mean that you will never be in the office at 5:01 without it being a major ordeal, will rules-lawyer every request not specifically in your job description, will struggle to build relationships with coworkers and clients, etc.
I can understand where you’re coming from. Companies aren’t as generous about cutting employees any slack anymore, so why should you go the extra mile for them? etc. But I’m just telling it like it is. Give an innocuous answer and get on with your life. After giving that answer, I think you would only stand a chance to be hired for a technical position, and then only if your technical skills were miles ahead of the other candidates.
Maybe you can see the employer perspective a bit if you pictured yourself hiring a babysitter or a caregiver for your parents. How would that answer from a potential employee strike you?
This question as worded doesn’t make sense. Firstly, where are the dollars coming from?
Also, 10 is rather too small to expect to find even one person with the same birthday as one other person (the canonical is that in a room of 20 people, there’s around a 50% chance that two of them have the same birthday) - never mind one person with the same birthday as you.
As the question is worded, that has to be one of the worst wagers I have ever come across!
I saw some cartoon somewhere where the answer was "standing over your lifeless corpse while I crumple up a copy of my resume and throw it down on you saying, “Vacation approved bitch!”
During the first interview, I was asked to declare my favorite book, movie and album and try to convince the interviewer to buy them. That’s about it, although they probably used various other techniques to figure out if I was a reader or not. Extensive knowledge of the history of literature (or whatever) is not a prerequisite, just an interest in the material; I never met a literature major while I worked there, but everyone I worked with was definitely a reader.
I really don’t think a literature degree is going to be much help in a bookstore these days. I own an indie store and my employees are mostly just people with a real passion for reading. Two out of the five used to work at other bookstores and one is an ex-librarian. None have extensive literature backgrounds, but the vast majority of my customers aren’t shopping for “literature.”
I just asked the question because the last few times I went into a Borders (probably six or seven years ago at this point), I couldn’t find an employee who knew anything about books. They couldn’t even direct me to the right section of the store, and had to call a manager to look up an author for me. I figured that since they’d gone book/video/music, they gave up on finding anyone with a knowledge of (or even interest in) books.
I worked at Borders PT (mainly for the discount and to help out a buddy). However, all the employees at my store knew a lot about books- but in some cases just in a section or two. Mind you, this was one of the smaller Borders which they have mostly closed, it seems that the bigger the store the less the employee knowledge.
I think that’s true in a lot of stores. Management has an easier time with scheduling if all of the staff knows just enough to work anywhere in the store, instead of being a specialist useful only in one section. And, obviously, the more different things the store carries, the less the checkout clerk will know about any of them.
But then I remember the good ol’ days when the guy behind the register at the Radio Shack could read resistor color codes, the guy at the hobby shop knew which glue worked best with aluminum, and the kid behind the counter at McDonald’s had the prices on the menu memorized and could count back your change.
After working for a huge software company for over 15 years and conducting probably hundreds of interviews for my group based on iron-clad HR policies, I was amazed at some of the questions I received interviewing at my new job, which is a small private company in its own building with about 14 employees.
Granted none of this bothered me personally, and these were towards the end of the interview after getting the technical stuff out of the way…but I was rather shocked.
Here are some verbatim:
“Do you have a problem with dogs? Because I like to bring my dog to the office. He’s kinda the office mascot. HERE MICKEY!!! HERE HE IS!!” ::dog runs into room, starts playing with me::
“Do you have a problem with swearing?”
“Do you eat meat? We’re meat eaters around here. Don’t want to deal with some silly vegan when we all pick a place for lunch. <ha ha>”
“Are you a Republican?”
“Do you care if some of us smoke in the back room of the office?” (NOTE: This is Oregon, which has a pretty clear policy on this one).
I got the job and get along really well with everyone…but I can’t imagine someone who has views that don’t align with ours sitting through those questions. Nor can I imagine that person getting hired.
So is this a “small company” thing, or a “we’re getting sued soon” thing? I’ve only ever worked at these two places, so I have no frame of reference.
Probably the latter. Most of those questions aren’t necessarily illegal (I’m not sure if you can ask someone’s political affiliation in Oregon), but they’re pushing it.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. Of course if we were to get sued by someone that we hired, it would probably be for the smoking room. I’m 100% sure you can’t smoke indoors in any public space in Oregon. (Except bars, which is going away this January).
Borders’ personnel structure is somewhat unique for a MNC in that, while firing is done at the regional level (the lowest-ranked person who could fire someone in San Diego is the regional supervisor for Southern California, IIRC), hiring is done at the lowest local level (once you pass the online test, the hiring decision seems to be done by the people you’ll eventually report to). At least, that’s what it seems like to me, considering the hiring patterns I’ve seen at the Borders I worked at and other ones in the region. What I’m saying is, the Borders in your area probably just makes shitty hiring decisions, and once Borders hires someone, that person practically has to kill a customer to get fired. I could tell you horror stories about one coworker who pulled so much crazy shit that he would’ve been fired in a week anywhere else. Otherwise, though, I was generally impressed by my coworkers’ knowledge of the store layout and such. I wasn’t caught up in that much, since I worked in the cafe (I wanted to work in books, but there wasn’t an opening), but whenever I had a question for a coworker in the book department, they usually had the answer quickly.
Anyway, you’re not actually talking about knowledge of books, you’re talking about knowledge of store sections. If you work at a big enough bookstore, you don’t actually have to read Anne Rice books to know that they belong in the Gay Vampires section (or whatever), you just have to give half a shit about your job.
I had a strange interview experience recently, hopefully someone here can help me make sense of it.
I was cold called by a recruiter about an IT position for which I am more than qualified. He passed my information onto to the company, and I had a phone interview with the hiring manager. The call went great, we talked about the job, my qualifications, my background, and so on for about an hour. Not five minutes after hanging up with the hiring manager the recruiter called me up all excited about how the hiring manager wanted to meet me in person. Great! I told him I could be available for an interview with a couple of days notice. No, no, no, the hiring manager wanted to meet me that same day, after work, at a local restaurant.
Ok, nothing odd about that, the guy’s probably too busy during the day. So we arrange to meet at a local restaurant. The manager showed up, and all during dinner we continued our conversation. Things were going great. And then this bit of dialogue happened:
Hiring Manager: “So, is there anything about you I should know?”
Me: “How do you mean?”
HM: “Is there ‘anything’ about you I should know?” (He actually made finger quote gestures)
Me: “I’m sorry, I don’t follow. What exactly do you mean?”
HM: “You know ‘anything’…”
Me:
The conversation cooled down considerably after that, and it goes without saying I did not get the job. I have no idea what the hell he was asking! My friend has said that maybe he was asking if I was gay. The recruiter was not help either, he would only tell that the hiring manager decided to go with an internal candidate.
