The Interview.
When it goes smoothly, you love the process and can’t stop telling your friends and family all about it.
When it’s tough and feels like you are starring in an episode of “when animals attack” (and you’re not the animal) we tend to hate the process.
Whether you love it or hate it, the interview isn’t going away.
In fact, interviewing serves a great purpose in screening the right people, with the right potential for the right role. We all know the folklore of the crazy questions many Silicon Valley tech giants used to ask and there are enough articles out there already on “How To Interview” so I’ll spare you the “X Tips To Landing The Job” article and get to the fun part.
- Fact: The main reason people hate interviewing is due to the questions they will face.
I’ve been interviewing my entire life. I’ve sat on both sides of the table and have had the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of interviewing others as well as being interviewed myself. I have seen, heard and been asked all sorts of questions over the years. Some of them great while others pretty bland.
Here are the more creative questions I wish were asked along my career path (minus the overt psychology and reasoning behind them). All of these can measure someone’s aptitude & attitude if asked in the right spirit:
- What would I find in your refrigerator?
- If there was a warning label placed on you what would it say?
- If you could build anything out of LEGO, what would it be and why?
- If you were a type of food, what type of food would you be and why?
- How would you explain the internet in one sentence to a 5-year-old?
- How would you convince someone to do something they didn’t want to do?
- If you could trade places with any other person for a week, famous or not famous, living or dead, real or fictional, with whom would you trade and why?
- What’s the difference between a Merry-Go-Round and a Carousel?
- On a scale from one to ten, rate me as an interviewer.
- If you woke up and had 2,000 unread emails and could only answer 300 of them how would you choose which ones to answer?
- If someone wrote a biography about you, what do you think the title should be?
- You’re a new addition to the crayon box. What color would you be and why?
- What is the funniest thing that has happened to you recently?
- If I were to hire you for this job and I granted you three promises with regard to working here, what would they be?
- Teach me something I don’t know in the next three minutes.
The floor is yours: What’s the best interview question you’ve been asked?
Please leave your comment below as your insights are greatly appreciated and a learning opportunity for everyone reading this article.
With leadership,
Joshua / www.JoshHMiller.com
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