…p-l-e-a-s-e… Don’t spend your time trying to prepare to answer oddball or dumbass interview questions… publications like Glassdoor.com publish oddball and crazy questions that they claim hiring or interviewing authorities ask…
… You can spend your time worrying about how you would answer questions like, “does life fascinate you?”…or “how would you get an elephant into a refrigerator?”… or “how many planes are currently flying over Kansas?”…but people who ask these kind of questions are rare…
Best spend your time focusing on what you can do for the company that nobody else can… most people don’t spend enough time focusing on this kind of question…
Any interview or hiring authority that is so egotistical to ask these kind of “I just want to trick you” questions may not be the kind of person you work for… they are more interested in tricking you than they are in finding out if you would be a good employee…
I had a candidate sometime back who got asked one of these off the wall questions and simply asked the authority, with a smile, “what does that have to do with job?”… The hiring authority thought she had lots of courage to ask that in a really nice way…
These questions may very well be amusing… but don’t get hung up
In 1999 a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Dan Simons and a colleague,Chris Chabris published a result of a study on selective attention. They coined the phrase “inattentional blindness.” They asked subjects to watch a video of six people passing two basketballs. One team was dressed in white shirts and the other team was dressed in black shirts. The subjects were instructed to count how many times the three players wearing white shirts passed the basketball while ignoring players wearing black as they passed their own ball. In the middle of the video a person wearing a gorilla suit walked into the picture, beat its chest and walked off. They found that 50% of the subjects failed to notice the person in the gorilla suit.
This phenomenon has often been cited by attorneys questioning witnesses to a crime. It is been proven over and over that at least 50% of the time, the viewers of an activity, especially a fast moving activity, like a crime, don’t remember seeing what was right in front of them.
So how does this affect your interviewing? Well, it’s really quite simple. You need to be aware that any interviewing or hiring authority has a number of key issues that they are “watching” for. These issues can range anywhere from looking for a particular type of experience all the way to trying to avoid someone who has had too many jobs, lives far away from the place of employment, or doesn’t have a degree.
Candidates can do the same thing. They will often tell us that they want to “avoid” one or two particular issues that they think had something to do with the “bad experience” that they just had at the company they are leaving or have left. For instance, candidates who had to leave a small company for any reason tell us that they want to go to work for a big company with stability. They think there is more stability in larger companies than there is in smaller ones. Candidates simply want to avoid what they think they just burned them.
What happens to both parties in situations like this is that they will focus their attention so much on what they want to try to avoid that they miss the “gorrilla.”
I can’t tell you the number of interviewing and hiring authorities who have missed understanding a very important part of a candidates experience or background… the part that could really help them… because they got hung up on focusing on one or two aspects of the candidate they were concerned about. We have candidates who will get so focused on one or two issues of a ccompany, a job or a hiring authority that they miss important qualities of the company.
As a candidate, you need to realize that if you have any risk factors like being out of work for an extended period of time in having had three jobs in three years, being fired, etc. a hiring authority is going to automatically focus on that issue and there’s a good chance they will not see the qualities or experience that make you a good candidate. By knowing this you will be able to emphasize the strengths and qualities so that the hiring authority is not blind to.
Know what your risk factors are in the eyes of the hiring authority. Realize that they may get so focused on those they don’t see the reasons you are a quality candidate. Don’t be a victim of inattentional blindness.
This past week, I just finished listening to Great by Choice by Jim Collins… probably one of the best business books I’ve read in a long time… and I read just about everything anyone suggests
It reminds me that if you are any kind of professional you know that you need to be reading books that relate to your profession all the time… leaders are readers… I’m often blown away by people who are supposed to be professionals who spend their time reading fiction or not reading at all… we all have to be “students” of our game
It also reminded me to emphasize the fact that if you are a candidate looking for a job, you’d best be reading one or two business books that relate to what you do… somewhere along the line one of the interviewing authorities you speak with is going to ask you what business book you’ve recently read and, “how has it had an impact on you and your profession?” If you don’t have a really good answer… I mean you really good answer to this question, you’re going to be caught flat-footed… and worse, if you act like you have recently read a book just to look good and then get asked to describe it in detail, …and when you can’t you will certainly be eliminated as a candidate…
What are you reading?…how has it had an impact on your professional life?
just read advise by a well known author and career adviser…he advises people who are looking for work to “target the top 10 firms you’d like to work for” and agressively pursue them for a job. He communicates the idea that just because you want to work at any organization…they also want you.
Unfortunately, this kind of advice gives people all kinds of false hopes about the reality of this job market. Unfortunately, reality… especially in this market… is not like in the movie Field of Dreams, “if you build it… they will come.” Just because it might be nice to work at a particular place has got nothing to do with reality of finding a job there. Just because you might think it would be peachy to work at a particular place has nothing to do with the reality of them hiring… let alone hiring you.
If people are naïve enough to believe something like this, they quickly find out that the real world doesn’t work this way. Unfortunately, they spend a lot of time and effort before they are deflated and disappointed by reality.
My suggestion would be to target 200 companies… 300… anybody who might listen. Please don’t put your faith in the “Top 10.” If you are an absolute rockstar in your profession, you… or your agent… might have luck doing this kind of thing. If you are like most of us mortals, you’re going to need to go after more organizations than that.
