While I agree that answers that come off a teleprompter are not helpful, I’m not sure it is productive to assume that the resume and references are bogus as well. But if you have an over-abundance of applicants, I guess that’s one way to whittle them down.
“Strengths are great. I’ll ask more about those in a minute. Right now, tell me about a weakness that you think has a potential for impacting your work.”
And if you couldn’t come up with something, I would not hire you. Because saying “I have no weaknesses” and “I have no weaknesses that will impact this job” are the same answer.
I hate those sorts of questions. My usual answer was that I tend to be blunt and speak my mind, regardless of the audience. It can be disconcerting to some.
I also hated the ‘where do you see yourself in five years?’ questions. Six months out is about as far as I’ve ever planned. At one job for a low level management position, I gave the usual meaningless answer and was hired. Five years later, I was the department director. If I had given that as my goal, I’m sure the boss at the time would have been put off.
“In the past I was too risk-averse, but now I’ve come to learn that the path of least risk is often the path of least gain.”
I’ve related this in another thread, but I was interviewing for a temp job - advertised as 6 months long. At the time, I’d been retired a couple of years and I was bored. I was interviewed by a group of 4 or 5 - one who would be my boss, one who I would be working closely with and I don’t know who the rest were. One of the “others” asked me the “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” question.
Honestly, it took all I had not to laugh in the guy’s face. I took a deep breath, and quite frankly told him I fully intended to be retired for real by then. I guess I did OK, because I got the job, and it was 6 months of nice pocket change.
That’s not what the question is about, though. The question is ‘can you come up with something that sounds like you think it’s a weakness, but has some kind of easy to explain solution, and can you sell it to the interviewer’. It absolutely is not about the actual qualities of the person, but how good their skills at interviewing (not the actual job) are, or whether they’ve read a guide to common interview questions and figured out the load of crap that will smell like roses to you.
You’re not actually learning anything but 'is this person good at BSing their way through an interview. You may want to filter on that, but it seems pretty pointless, especially since the better they are at playing the inrerview game they more likely they are to bail on your company.
“I don’t read minds” - then I go on to explain that while I’m a pretty good communicator and listener, eliciting requirements is not my strength and that I really prefer to work with a good B.A. (I’m a PM)
Or some similar other teamwork sort of question. It kind of goes to Dracoi’s answer - I don’t want to be a B.A., I want to work closely with a B.A. And if the organization doesn’t have them, I don’t want the job because I’ll end up being the BA.
I’ve gotten a chuckle (and another interview) out of the answer “I’m a woman in IT.” But it has to be the right audience.
I could pull that off. The last time I was interviewed (for my current job) the VP asked me what I wanted my epitaph to be. I’m always ready with that one and said “I told you I was sick”. The rest of the interview was loaded with laughs. Ok, we already knew each other, I don’t advise that under normal circumstances.
The interviewer may delude themselves into thinking that’s what they’ll get. What they’ll mostly hear is either someone stumbling and making a fool of themselves by trying to be honest, or someone giving some nicely packed ball of BS because they’re willing to jump through your silly hoops to get the job.
Uh-oh. I just ran through this scenario in my head and the only answer I can come up with is “apologized profusely and fixed the issue.” I’m guessing that answer wouldn’t get me a lot of points.
The question is so ubiquitous you would have to be retarded to not have encountered it and not have a prepared answer for it. I’ve never thought it was a bad thing to hire an employee who would enter an interview prepared. There is nothing in a prepared answer that says it’s a lie and I’d much rather hire someone who would research potential questions and have answers ready to go then someone who schlepped in off the street without any guess as to what is going to be asked.
That seems nuts to me. Nothing wrong with a polished, prepared answer to me as long as it’s plausible, relevant, and has a solution/workaround/etc. If I ask a follow up question, I expect it to show that the previous answers were not just memorized.
Of course, I’m sure there’s a reason I had a reputation as an easy person to interview with! I wasn’t looking to trip people up. I was looking to put people at ease and get them to tell me about their personal styles.
Only if you assume that the response is going to be an open and objective self-evaluation of the candidate’s weaknesses. In reality, the candidate is either going to pass off word-noises that sound like an answer but tell you nothing useful, or will fill your auditory canal with bullshit stealth bragging that probably isn’t true.
Here is a far better question: “I’ve assigned you Task A, which will take six weeks of full time effort and is due at that time. I go on vacation chasing bears around the Olympic Pennisula and am unreachable for the duration, and then my boss comes and assigns you Task B, which will take two weeks of full time effort and that he indicates he wants done immediately. How do you handle this situation and meet your committments?” It is a solid question that poses a realistic conflict (I would put more detail into the actual task descriptions applicable to the candidate) which cannot just be adequately resolved by handwaving or mouthing platitudes; the candidate either has to prioritize one task over another, or offer to work extra overtime, or else come up with some novel solution, like delegating part of one of the tasks to someone else, or negotiating with the boss for more time on one or both tasks, or whatever. There is no right answer to the question; it is all about letting me understand his appraoch to dealing with rational conflicts and priorities; does he or she confront the problem directly, or do they look for solutions and present them, or do they just silently accept the burden and work ever harder until they break? Of course, the candidate may not be honest with me about how they really deal with this kind of issue but it gives me a starting point to pose more specific questions about their response, and then relate it back to something in their past work experience, rather than just passively asking for examples or posing vague hypotheticals. I also try to ask process-oriented questions like, “You have a flight failure of a vehicle and are assigned the lead role in the anomaly investigation. Walk me through the steps of how you conduct an investigation.” Again, there’s no specific right answer (although there are definitely wrong answers or critical components to any investigation). This lets me see what they know or have observed about investigations, how they identify and organize their approach, their ability to recognize when they need to delegate and to whom, et cetera.
Asking stock answers in an interview begs stock responses, and gets you plugheads direct from central casting who will do only what you tell them if you happen to be standing over them giving them instructions. As a manager, I wanted employees who can think for themselves, propose plans of action to the problems they find, and who feel empowered to make decisions that they believe are in line with my expectations and get them rolling without having to wait for my direct approval if I’m not immediately available. In general, I’d rather have an employee who takes a wrong but well-reasoned course than one that sits in analysis paralysis, waiting for me to return from travel or otherwise become available. At least they’ll learn something, and their course of action might end up being better than what I would have recommended, or at least enough of a stopgap that we don’t look lost and foolish.
When I check references, I treat them like a mini interview, i.e. I ask specific questions about their experience referenced to the candidate’s resume or other work history, and also bits and pieces about their background to see if they are genuine. I think I can tell a bullshit reference; I clipped one who claimed to have worked for a certain company that I had experience with, and asked him the “What’s the color of the boathouse at Hereford?” question, and then ambushed him with a cup of coffee when he couldn’t answer it. (Well, that’s how it played out in my mind, anyway.) I then knew that candidate was a lying fuck and zero’d him off the list (he was already questionable anyway). If as a manager you don’t do the minimum to verify the claims on the resume and vet the references, you deserve the employees you hire. And don’t fob it off to HR and expect them to do a thorough job of vetting anything. Typically all they are going to see if the telephone number works and a human being answers to the name on the list. That’s about as useful as checking Yelp! reviews.
Stranger
It is a bullshit question, because the interviewer can’t expect a useful answer. Or maybe they can.
So there are a couple ways the interviewee could answer:
Stammer and act confused and not be able to give an answer or gets upset. Means the interviewee isn’t prepared and can’t think on his feet.
Gives an obvious bullshit canned answer. Means the interviewee is prepared, but copied his homework answers from the internet.
Gives an honest answer. Means the interviewee has no boundaries as he tells you about his alcoholism.
Gives a boilerplate “Situation, Task, Action, Result”, and can give reasonable answers to follow up questions. Here’s a problem I had, here are the steps I took to resolve it, and the problem is now handled.
Only the last answer isn’t a red flag. But it still doesn’t give the interviewer much, only that the interviewee is a professional who is equipped to handle bullshit interview questions without falling to pieces. If you really get lots of candidates who flub that, then by all means go ahead and ask. But one would hope that you don’t get too many such candidates.
But you could do a lot better with more targeted questions like “tell me about a mistake you made and how you handled it”. Because at least there you can see how the candidate might fit in with the way your company works.
That hasn’t been my experience. (Again, I didn’t ask this question, but I’ve sat in on interviews where it was asked.)
There is nothing wrong with a prepared answer, but there is plenty wrong with asking a question which the candidate probably has prepared for. Sorry, it is a lazy question to ask. I have never asked it of any candidate, and if anyone had ever asked it of me my eyes would roll.
What is a lot more important is to see how well they know the stuff on their resume and how they handled difficulties. I ask about the worst bugs they have committed and how they debugged the problem. If they claim they never ran across any they don’t have the programming experience I’m looking for or they refuse to admit they can screw up, which is the kiss of death in debugging. If they were interviewing for a PM job I’d ask about projects from hell or maybe people from hell.
For new grads I ask questions to see if they understand relevant course material in depth.
It’s lazy to ask about weaknesses but not lazy to ask about the resume?
I think it’s been mentioned several times in this thread that asking about mistakes is really common, and if we know it, the world knows it and can prepare for it.
I never asked about weaknesses, mostly because I didn’t want to trip up an otherwise promising interviewee by eliciting a bullshit answer like perfectionism. But people knowing what you’re going to ask says nothing about the value of your questions; it just changes how you should evaluate the answers.
But even this answer is not a real answer to the question.
Anyone who got a lot of candidates who fell apart answering that question should take a look at their candidate evaluation process since they are bringing in losers. And your suggestion is exactly the kind of thing I go with. If someone claims they never made mistake they are either deluded or they never challenge themselves.
You’re hired!
Now, what was the number of that reference again?
Of course it’s not a real answer to the question, because the question isn’t a question, it’s a meta-question: can the candidate give a professional response to a bullshit question?
It’s slightly more useful than “If you were ice cream, what flavor would you be, and why?”, but not by much. It screens out obvious flakes, but couldn’t you screen out obvious flakes by asking useful questions instead?
The question could be useful if employees are expected to handle all sorts of bullshit while still maintaining a professional attitude. It’s an answer from the other side: “What’s the company’s biggest weakness? The company spends a lot of time making employees jump through silly hoops, and focusses on process rather than results.”
So it’s useful in alerting candidates that the company does a lot of timewasting bullshit, so if you want to work here you better get used to the idea.