Lucas vs. 'Standard Questions'
Monday, October 25, 2021
At Inc, business writer Suzanne Lucas makes a plea to job interviewers:
I completely agree, and while I wish the rest of the column had made the point more explicitly, I think many readers will likely connect the dots for themselves that The purpose of a job interview is for each person in the conversation to be able to learn how good a fit the applicant and the job are for each other. Lucas does list a few questions better suited to that purpose for everyone involved, and even suggests ways to interviewers to let applicants know, in her words, what they might be "getting into.""What's your greatest weakness?"
Just because everyone else knows about it doesn't make it useful... (Image by Austin Chan, via Unsplash, license.)
"Where do you see yourself in five years?"
"Why did you leave your last job?"
These are all standard, generic interview questions. I've asked them. I've had people ask me. You've asked them. And everyone lies in their answers because if they told the truth, the hiring managers and recruiters would reject them.
What a ridiculous game.
That said, Lucas never explores why so many people ask such vapid questions as the ones she opens with. There can be more or less innocent reasons, such as inexperience on the part of the interviewer, or someone being scheduled to do an interview at the last second. But as the age and the seniority of an interviewer increase, the odds of the cause being second-handedness greatly increase. Coming from one's potential manager, that's a possible red flag one would not want to ignore.
Fortunately, I doubt many second-handers are going to bother going against the flow, so perhaps this column will, in addition to helping good bosses interview better, will also cause the bad ones stand out more.
-- CAV
2 comments:
I'm going to disagree with "Where do you see yourself in five years?" being a vapid question, at least in some contexts. I'm currently helping interview for the company I work for and this question has helped us weed out some people. In our context the question allows the interviewee to demonstrate that they actually want to do the sort of work we're hiring them to do, and that they realize they're not going to be in a corner office in six months. We've had issues with both, and this question has been helpful in determining who moves forward in the hiring process.
The issue is, as I said above, context. We're hiring someone for a three-year position with the intent for them to accumulate sufficient knowledge to move up the ranks after that, so it's good to know if we're on the same page as the interviewees. If we were hiring an accountant, with the intent that they'd be an accountant for 30 years, it would be totally different.
That's a fair point: Indeed, there is conceivably a context in which any of those questions can be relevant, although probably most likely/easiest to see for that one.
So we have a good caveat: It's on the job-seeker to judge how on-point vs ritualistic the questions are.
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