Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2011, and its phrase “with the crisis we’re in” refers to the Spanish economic crisis of 2011.
Large companies tend to delegate hiring to “experts”, such as a Human Resources department. I’m not going to criticise the professionalism of HR, since, as in any profession, some people are better than others at recruiting candidates for the job on offer.
The only thing I’m sure of is that HR often becomes a filter that keeps out a good professional and lets through someone who isn’t suited to the job, or who is simply mediocre in their field. Job interviews are full of awkward questions, and many of them are absurd questions whose only purpose is to get the candidate to lie in order to land the job. If a candidate were completely honest in a job interview, they would probably never get through the filter.
Awkward questions in a job interview
What happens when a 35-year-old woman goes to a job interview and sits down in front of these hiring professionals?
Question 1. Are you planning to get pregnant?
For heaven’s sake, she’s a woman, and of course her dream is to start a family some day. According to the HR manual, if this woman said “Yes, of course I want to be a mother”, HR analyses that answer and reckons that, if she has a stable partner, she could get pregnant within roughly five years. So if there were another candidate who already had a school-age child and wasn’t planning to have more, the job would go to her, all else being equal in terms of qualifications for the post.
Recommended answer: The usual advice for this question is either to dodge it slightly by saying you don’t like talking about your private life (which is taken to mean that you are planning to get pregnant), or to show more interest in your career than in becoming a mother. As a rule, HR loves this second answer, although very often it’s said only to get the job. It’s also true that, sadly more and more often, many women postpone motherhood until later in life so as not to harm their careers. Either way, I don’t think it’s a sensible question for a job interview, above all because you’re asking to be lied to, and you’re getting into a subject that it’s actually rude to ask about.
See also: Tips for getting through a phone interview
Question 2. Sexual orientation?
Let me say first of all that this question is now illegal in a job interview. That doesn’t mean they can’t ask it.
A heterosexual person has no problem answering it. The problem comes if you’re gay, because there are still companies that wouldn’t give a management position to a gay person. When this question is asked, you should generally assume that admitting you’re gay will close doors for you (otherwise, why ask if they don’t care?).
Recommended answer: The experts advise: “I don’t like talking about my private life.” Of course, that amounts to saying you’re gay, since a heterosexual person would simply say they’re straight. It’s one or the other: either you lie or you tell the truth, bearing in mind that lying isn’t ethical, just as rejecting a candidate because of their sexual orientation isn’t ethical either.
Question 3. What do you think of your previous company?
HR has a basic principle of not hiring anyone who trashes their previous company. I have always disagreed with this. Of course there will be exceptions, and one might infer that a person who criticises their previous employer will do the same to your company tomorrow. But the real question is whether I, as a company, am going to make the same mistakes this person is complaining about.
Experience tells me that great professionals often can’t stand working with a terrible leader or with bad professionals. If you feel you’ve worked with incompetent people who only made things difficult for you and didn’t let you develop professionally, why not say so clearly? After all, honesty is a virtue, and in this case we wouldn’t be looking at a lack of diplomacy but at someone worth listening to. Here’s an example from my own experience:
See also: Mistakes companies make when hiring salespeople
A few years ago I was working as a sales director. At that company, hiring was done through the HR department. I didn’t mind that department hiring production, administrative and factory staff and so on, but when it came to choosing a section head, a salesperson or an area manager, I didn’t like them choosing for me. I wanted to choose them myself, because I had already had bad experiences with people who had been foisted on me.
One day I interviewed a young man who, had HR interviewed him, would have been shown the door, because he broke every rule of job interview protocol. I still remember his words:
“I want to see my old company sunk, closed down. I want to take all their customers. I promise you won’t regret hiring me, because the customers trust me and I’ve been doing this all my life.”
When I asked him what had happened at his company, he told me he had been fired for arguing with the section head. He said the section head was the manager’s nephew and was useless. In fact, he called him “incompetent” several times.
I looked at him and saw a furious lion, and in a world of cats, having a lion on your team is a clear advantage.
I took him on. To my surprise, in less than five months we had increased production considerably thanks to the customers he brought with him. He wasn’t a show-off. He was hard-working and, most importantly, he was effective out in the field.
I’m quite sure he wouldn’t have got past HR’s filter, and they would probably have hired some mediocre person who had spent weeks looking up how to pass a job interview, the most common interview questions and so on.
Other rather absurd questions that often come up in job interviews include:
4. Why should we hire you and not another candidate?
I love watching how, out of 30 candidates, every single one tries to show they have better qualities and skills than the other 29, when in reality only one of them is the best, and they won’t manage to prove it with this kind of question.
Personally, I’d answer this one jokingly: “Well, I don’t know who the other candidates are. If you’ve got Warren Buffett in the waiting room, don’t think twice and hire him instead of me.”
5. Do you have any flaws, and what are they?
Given that nobody is perfect, and starting from the premise that everyone makes mistakes at some point… good question.
6. What do your colleagues think of you?
Do you mean the colleagues I go out partying with every weekend, or the one I argue with every morning because we don’t get along?
7. Why do you want to work for our company?
Well, to be honest, I’d rather work for a much bigger company that paid better, but with the crisis we’re in there aren’t many companies offering jobs, so I’ll have to make do with you until something better comes along.
8. How much do you want to earn?
How much would you be willing to pay?
9. Do you consider yourself successful?
Well, I’ve been unemployed for two years, if you don’t hire me I don’t know how I’ll pay the mortgage in two months’ time, and my wife is about to leave me… yes, I consider myself a very successful person.
10. Are you uncomfortable working under pressure?
Not at all. I have two dreams in life: one is to be hit hard on the knees, and the other is to feel under pressure at work.
Conclusion: HR is probably very efficient at its job for certain positions, but from what I’ve observed, in the sales world a good salesperson is recognised by other methods, not by a series of questions designed to draw out false answers.
Everything said in this article is, of course, my personal opinion.
Featured image: Alan Cleaver, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
