I wouldn’t have gotten that job because I would have provided a smartass answer. I can think of two just off the top of my head. (1) Just long enough to reach the ground, and (2) I make them commensurate with my crimes.
Jobs I have not gotten because of my smartass answers include the weirdest job interview ever. It was for a security consultant (read: burglar alarm installer, basically). At no point did I encounter a live human. The entire interview was conducted over a speaker with me in a small room. I had to answer a couple of obnoxious questions to even be buzzed into the small room, and many more obnoxious questions followed. When the voice got to “Have you ever attempted to overthrow the us government by sedition or force?” I said, “Sedition,” and then I left. Actually the question was not phrased exactly like this, it was phrased more as an either/or thing, so it wasnt quite as smartass as it could have been. I didn’t get the job. By that time I didn’t WANT the job.
I never had to face any of the interviews described here. For my first job, I spent a half hour talking to a famous mathematician who hired me on the spot. (“I always like to keep a position open as long as possible in case I want to fill it”) and after that, I was always hired on my reputation.
But my son at a well-known software company gave job interviews regularly and says that the results are so random as to be essentially useless. Infamous example: Why are manhole covers round? Official answer: because round covers can’t fall in. While that is so, there are many other possible reasons. Men are (sort of round), round pipes are easy to manufacture and don’t have weak corners… I think the reasons are lost in the depths of history, but there is an official answer.
At one interview I was asked if I cussed a lot.
The bosses there cussed lot and seems some people got offended by it and quit.
I would have fit right in but they hired someone with more experience.
The job was teaching kids in camp /rec environment. After some of the usual stuff, they started this line of questioning:
“What sort of relationship do you want to have with the kids here”?
“I always go for friendly, but not friends with my students.”
“That’s not what we mean. Um… How close do you feel you should be to the kids?”
“Like I said, I think teachers should try to be friendly, but there should be an understnding that it’s a student / teacher situation.”
“Well…” At this point another guy took over. “What we want to know is, do you think it would be appropriate for a teacher to have a romantic relationship with a student?”
I stared at them for a moment, then said slowly, “I hope you take my hesitation just now as a sign that such a thing would NEVER have crossed my mind.”
Didn’t end up working there. They creeped me out. Obviously there had been some issues with other employees, but did they really think they’d catch a perv like that in the interview?
Hmmm. The current job I’m in I was asked how I felt about entering nuclear facilities and potentially being exposed to gamma radiation. To which I replied “we’re always being exposed to gamma radiation. It’s the dose rate that needs to be managed.”
In my very early 20s I interviewed for a receptionist gig at a law office. The partner huffed into the room, plopped down at his desk and said “I HATE interviews! Why should I hire you?” My reply was if you do hire me you won’t have to do any more interviews.
They had a point. Supervisors are just regular people who’ve shown initiative and willingness to use their judgment.
I have coworkers who are helpless without instructions. Anything outside of a narrow set of templates turns into a two-person job. People who won’t even try to solve problems themselves make the group less efficient.
Well, I don’t mean to sound conceited, but I like to think that I’m resourceful enough to handle most situations that come my way. At the security guard job I used to have, for example.
One evening when I was on duty some jokester pulled the fire alarm. (The station was a block and a half away.) I had no idea how to shut off the alarm, and my post orders said nothing about it. A maintenance supervisor came in and shut the alarm off. And I had been there for several years… you’d think the office manager would have told me about this long before.
I was able to discuss situations intelligently with this manager, and I even came up with a suggestion or two for improving procedures–which they adopted and, for all I know, still use there.
Your answer - “Go to someone who has authority over me and knows the applicable rules.” - may not come across to the interviewer as resourceful. You said just now that you checked your post orders first; that sounds like a better way to start the answer, because it shows some initiative and willingness to solve the problem yourself.
Better still would have been to say you looked at the alarm equipment for any clues how to shut it off. This last may sound obvious, but some of my coworkers use their mouths before their eyes.
My point is that if you don’t explicitly say this, the interviewer has no way of knowing you did. I have plenty of coworkers who wouldn’t have inspected the alarm panel in that scenario - I wish someone had weeded them out.
If multiple interviewers are forming the same impression of you based on your answer, then your answer isn’t serving you well.
Well, I like to think that one swallow doesn’t make a summer…
As a guard with seniority, I had to break in a number of new and temporary people, and the mistakes they made are amazing:
Leaving doorts unlocked, even whern they are alarmed.
Raising the flag on Sunday–upside down. (This was in the annex, right across the street from the fire station.)
Leaving the desk unattended on weekend shifts.
Leaving the dumpsters locked so the janitors can’t put the trash out.
#2 isn’t just amazing, it’s telling - it says they blithely go full steam ahead without sanity checking. The flag made it all the way up the pole without them noticing something was very wrong. This is someone I’d actively try to weed out.
The one in #4 can’t foresee obvious outcomes.
#1 and #3 sound like something a stern chat could fix.
I’d want to know who I was dealing with before I made a commitment to hire - it’s a lot easier not to hire than it is to fire.
Hear, hear!
I wondered just what the compaony was thinking when they hired one guard working temporarily at the annex: He didn’t know how to turn the alarms on or off (a client official had to do it) and, worse still, the guy was Vietnamese and could hardly understand me–he knew so little English! Hiring minorities is admirable, but–use some discretion! If there were a dire emergerncy this guy would be up a creek!
