In the words of a pilot who was applying for a job at a major airline once…
Asking a generic question like, “What is your greatest weakness?” offers no insight to either the candidate or the interviewer and begs a generic, meaningless, and potentially fraudulent response. Asking specific questions about experience from the candidate’s resume shows that the manager has prepared by reviewing the resume and identifying applicable experience, and offers the candidate to describe lessons he or she has learned and gives them an opportunity to expound on areas in which they think they shine. A job interview is just like interviewing a celebrity; you only have a few tens of minutes to get a useful picture, and if you fill it up with asking questions about their workout routine or how their costume fits, you don’t get any insight into what drives them to play their character in a certain way or how they learned to play brilliant music. In a job interview, every question counts.
Describing yourself as an “easy person to interview with,” should not be taken as a complement. If you aren’t both challenging the candidate and giving useful feedback for he or she to make their own evaluation, you are doing yourself, the candidate, and their future coworkers a disservice by not doing your best to make sure that the position and candidate are really a good fit. That doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk in the interview, or ask stupid logic puzzle questions, or do the Google/Facebook thing where you try to confuse and trip up a candidate to see how well the function in an asshole environment, but the candidate should be pressed to give their best answer and show their thinking patterns. Otherwise, the interview process is just a waste of time and you should just select a random resume out of a pile. Having seen exactly that being done, I can assure you it gets you crap employees that nobody involved wants to take responsibility to deal with or terminate, so the employees are then delegate to low priority roles or given shit tasking until they quit on their own or are RIFfed in typical corporate manager passive-aggressive fashion.
Stranger
“Well, I took this interview with a company thinking I would like it, but the interviewer just kept asking stock questions, so I started messing with her and giving really strange answers.”
You leap to a lot of conclusions from that train. I’m pretty confident in my own interview history, on both sides of the desk. And I take being easy to talk to as a huge compliment, especially in a situation that is filled with enormous stress.
I’m a small business - at my peak, we had six employees and right now I’m quite relieved to have cut it down to just myself and an assistant. So my experience is probably not applicable to a lot of interview situations…
Still, there’s a very strong correlation between prepared answers to that particular question and people who have BS’d their way through the entire resume and interview. I’m not really making a decision on that one question alone, but it’s a pretty safe bet that they’d have been better off learning some actual bookkeeping, payroll and tax skills and spent less time polishing their interview skills.
Yes, but what exactly do you want as an answer? A confession of alcoholism? Their biggest weakness is that they’re an unlovable loser destined to die alone?
Nobody is going to tell the interviewer their real weaknesses, the things that keep them up at night sobbing quietly. And yes, if they give obvious bullshit like “I’m a perfectionist who puts his employer ahead of my personal life”, that’s disqualifying.
The interviewer doesn’t want an honest answer, because an honest answer would reveal that the candidate doesn’t understand how the process works. The only possible answer is a brisk professional “I don’t do X well, so I do Y to compensate, which means Z.”
Is that what you’re expecting? Or do you want the candidate to sit and think in silence for 5 minutes and suddenly gain a burst of insight into themselves? Because that expectation is not reasonable. You say you don’t want a canned response, but what could you possibly get that would be acceptable other than a decent canned response?
I don’t intend to assume anything. I don’t know what industry you work in or what kind of positions you hire for. It may be a job that can be done by any person of mean intelligence and motivation, or you only need one out of five employees to do productive work, or that the work is transitory and you won’t be stuck with a useless slugbottom employee for years. When I ran an engineering shop, I was pressed to staff only to the minimum and then get the best work out of everyone. A single mediocre employee was a drag on everyone, and an outright terrible employee was an enormous burden, all the more for having support from neither HR nor upper management for zeroing him or her until they actually crossed a line to harassment or fraud. Putting in the time to thoroughly vet employees and ask useful questions paid dividends in both getting exceptional people and avoiding useless dead weight. And even though I took grief for it, the results were clear in comparison to the managers who hired whomever applied first; my hires were all well regarded by their peers, ranked “exceeds expectations” in performance reviews, and were the go-to people for our customers. The “whomever” hires were almost without exception underperformers who were RIFfed or demoted to makework until they quit. My guys are all still there on on their third manager who can’t sing their praises enough, and I take it as a personal compliment that I identified them as superior candidates.
Being “easy to talk to” in an interview is fine. I always aspired to put candidates at ease, giving them advise on preparing for the interview beforehand, telling them at each step what was going on, and assuring them that open questions like those I made above didn’t have a specific ‘right’ answer but were just intended to illustrate thought processes. I didn’t try to trick candidates into giving wrong answers, puzzle them up with mind teasers, or expect reiteration of complex or arcane knowledge under stress. (FWIW, I once had an interview consisting of the interviewer asking me a series of progressively more detailed material property questions, finally getting to exotic superalloys, and he was shocked I was able to answer about 90% of his questions completely and correctly without reference, occasionally citing chapter and section of MMPDS. I, on the other hand, thought he was a self-obsessed dick who didn’t bother to describe what he through my job responsibilites would be even after I explicitly asked for this, and ended the interview expressing my doubt that it would be an appropriate fit.) But being “easy to talk to” shouldn’t be “being easy to talk at”, and getting pat answers to easily anticipated questions tells you almost nothing about how the employee actually thinks. If you don’t care how he or she thinks, and it isn’t important to the role, then I guess that’s fine, but I’ve never hired someone without wanting to understand how they respond to questions that are off script or just how well their knowledge matches their resume.
Stranger
I weigh 155 kg – anyone can see that – thus I would not be telling anything new.
I said I was easy to talk to, nothing about not figuring out how anyone thinks, etc. That’s where you are reading something into my posts that is not there. Making people comfortable and having a conversation was always more important to me than putting them on the spot, so I never went in for tricks or gotchas. But I asked follow up questions, and I never took kindly to someone acting as if the interview was a waste of time.
Pretty much any question can be useful if used well. The best questions in the world won’t help a lousy interviewer pick a good candidate.
I second this sentiment. Clearly the interviewer cannot expect an honest answer. Let’s say that my greatest weakness at work is that sometimes I let my personal life creep into the job and I get short and nasty with my co-workers, talk about them behind their backs, and have to go to the bar at least once per week after work and stay until closing time to keep from killing someone.
Do you think I would tell you that at a job interview? Of course not.
So, the interviewer does not really expect a confession of a true weakness, and according to this thread does not want a canned response. So, I guess what an interviewer wants out of someone who is going to be the next employee of the firm is someone who can bullshit convincingly while again telling the interviewer a complete lie about a pretend weakness.
Is that who you want as your next employee? Someone who can lie to you without you knowing it? Because the candidate will lie. We all have our weaknesses that when said without getting to know the person will seem disqualifying.
The question does not have a safe answer.
I happened to think about this recently when working something from the beginning as I find I need to. I thought, hey, that would be a good answer for that “weakness” question. I find I can’t pick something up in the middle and feel comfortable running with it because I might assume wrong. I prefer to run reports from the beginning and trace things through to feel I have the whole picture. This does take more time and shows up my risk-averseness. But if someone thinks what I do is the right way to do it, it would sound like a “I’m a perfectionist” example.
Interviewers may use these questions only for comparison between prospects and not really care about the answer at all. So it doesn’t have to be what you say, but how you say it.
Asking a candidate a question for which you expect them to have a pat answer gives you essentially zero insight into what they think or how they will respond to a real work conflict or issue. It wastes both your time and the candidates in just filing space without providing any novel insight to the interviewer or a real opportunity to the employee to demonstrate experience. It is, in fact, a kind of “gotcha” question, because the candidate either provides a safe answer that is meaningless, or struggles to answer it honestly in a way that responds to the query without putting them in a bad light while not gaining any insight into what the interviewer is looking for, or experience that may address the question. It’s a vague, open-ended question that begs the safest possible response, which is to give an answer that doesn’t inform anything. If an interviewer asked me this question, and I didn’t feel like blowing off the interview right there, I’d respond with something like, “Sometimes I work too much.” What does that mean? Your guess is as good as mine. Now ask a real question.
Stranger
I don’t think you’ve read my posts in this thread. But I’ll repost the relevant ones:
I don’t believe in canned interview questions at all and the cliche ones are especially non-productive. I haven’t conducted interviews in a couple of years but, when I did, I always made it a point to be subtle, friendly and, most importantly, conversational. It is amazing what people will tell you when they think they are in a much less formal setting. You can just talk to them like they are old friends and almost everyone opens up eventually sometimes resulting in spectacular failures. I never wanted them to fail because I because I wanted to get the process over just as much as they did but but the majority of people will willingly volunteer very good reasons why you shouldn’t hire them as long as you let them speak freely and ask simple questions.
I have been interviewed myself by people that think they are bleeding edge psychologists and attempt to do ‘behavioral interviews’ which are equally complete bullshit but also abusive and I will not participate in them anymore on either side. I refuse to use any particular interview technique other than informal conversation because that works much better. Oddly enough, one of my coworkers at the megacorp that we work at figured out the same exotic technique and is now in charge of doing most of the interviews for our facility. HR can try to justify themselves with complex processes all they want but all you really need to do is meet with someone and see where the conversation goes.
What is your greatest weakness?
Answering stupid questions. People would come up to me all the time and ask me stupid questions. I’d answer. Couldn’t seem to help myself as I like helping others. Then I realized that it wasted my time. No matter what my answer the person asking the question rarely learned from it. Because what i had failed to understand was that stupid questions were normally asked by stupid people. So, now I’ve cut back to answering one a day.
Anymore questions?
Hell, that would work for me… my follow up would be “ok, how did you fix it?” The first response already told me you take responsibility for your mistakes and do your best to fix them; the second could provide information on other things like whether you’re the kind of person who’d rather do-now or schedule.
I think this really depends on the interviewer and department. My mom is, for whatever reason, very concerned with people “playing the game” properly. So she often rejects people if their cover letter is formatted “incorrectly” or is missing; or if they don’t give a stock non-answer to one of these questions. The reasoning is that there’s a certain “interview game” and that you’re not professional or aware enough of business culture if you don’t give those non-answers.
She fully admits the answers are stupid and vapid, but her argument is that if you’re a non-executive employee (like she or the applicants are) a lot of business relationships with other companies boil down to scripted stupid, empty, vapid appeasement and knowing the correct magic words is more important than giving a thoughtful answer. The other more specific, company-internal questions are where things like culture fit or work ethic should be determined. Though she may be more lenient or have a different stance if she were interviewing, say, one of the software engineers they hire and not people like accountants.
I… disagree with her on this, but I think you’re kind of in a crapshoot with what kind of answer they want to these non-questions. It depends on the groupthink of that particular corporation or HR department, and the specific biases of that interviewer.
This is exactly why I hate that question and those like it. Here is candidate A who would be a perfect fit for the company and who desperately needs a job. His application is a very good one, but he gets marked down and/or loses the job because he doesn’t answer the bullshit question in the expected bullshit way of the particular interviewer.
IOW, all interviewers think it is a bullshit question and expect either bullshit answer A or bullshit answer B. If you guess wrong on A or B, you get marked down. That is corporate nonsense at its finest.
That’s kinda crazy, but thanks for the information. I wasn’t aware anyone would put that particular spin on it.
To be honest, I don’t think there is an answer for any interview question that can’t bother someone. Some, like the weakness one, are more crappyshot than others.