Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2013. It presents Cesar Alierta and Pablo Isla as current executives; Alierta left the chair of Telefónica in 2016 and Isla left Inditex in 2022.
Google is a benchmark as a company, so plenty of businesses try to copy as much as they can from it, including its hiring process. And it isn’t just Google: more and more companies are adopting innovative job interviews, and we don’t hesitate to imitate even the companies with the toughest job interviews on the planet. (Read: Think that was a tough job interview? You haven’t been interviewed on Wall Street.)
In theory, this kind of interview could help reveal a lot of qualities, but in practice the execution usually falls short. How many golf balls fit in this room? How would you kill a crocodile with your bare hands? These are some of the “brainteaser” questions that usually have no concrete answer, since nobody could really work out how many balls fit in a room, and very few people will ever find themselves having to fight a crocodile.
In principle, these “puzzle questions” would only measure the candidate’s patience and perhaps their wit or creativity in answering. The truth is that big companies ask them, so it’s “cool” to have them in our company too, even though most companies don’t know how to use the answers to decide whether a candidate is suitable.
Many executives get annoyed when they run into this kind of question, because they feel time is being wasted on what they call “gimmick questions”.
The main complaint of many job candidates is, first of all, how hard it is to get their CV seen at all: with the rise of new technologies, a company rarely reads even 30% of the CVs sent to it online. If the candidate is lucky enough to have their CV read and is finally called in for a face-to-face interview, many say it’s actually demotivating to see what some job interviews have turned into, since they feel that most of these “innovative questions” can’t measure anything at all.
Group job interviews
Group interviews are also “cool”, and increasingly common in Spain. Here too the execution leaves a lot to be desired: when a company runs a group interview, it needs to make it very clear what it is looking for in the candidate.
We spoke with five executives who have recently attended group interviews, and all of them agree that they came away feeling the company was experimenting with a format that ended up as a circus, because the candidates didn’t know what they were supposed to do or what the exercise actually involved. To some, it felt like a sad piece of theatre in which each candidate acted out what they thought the recruiters wanted.
(Read: How to stand out in a group job interview.)
Do I knock down the others? Do I show team spirit towards the other candidates who are trying to knock me down? Do I try to show leadership in a room where everyone wants to show leadership, or do I stay quiet and observant and stay out of the fray, even at the risk of looking like I lack initiative?
To give you an idea of the situation, these were the doubts of a former human resources director whose company closed five months ago. In other words, someone who had spent 15 years as an interviewer and recruiter was lost in an interview, and came away thoroughly disappointed with the new “Americanized” interview systems.
For this recruiter, the problem with these supposedly innovative interviews is that they aren’t really that innovative: everyone knows them, and everyone knows the kind of questions they’re going to be asked. It’s increasingly rare to find someone who isn’t expecting some of these questions, and you can certainly see that everyone knows the theory of how to stand out in a group interview. That makes it very hard to assess the qualities of a candidate who knows the format and has prepared properly.
It’s like when someone shakes your hand firmly and confidently. Are they genuinely self-assured, or an insecure person trying to look confident? That’s what happens when we try to catch our candidates off guard in a job interview: sometimes the hunter (the interviewer) becomes the hunted (the candidate). The result can be a candidate who is probably less suited to the job, but better at getting through the interview.
The circus begins when these interviews and questions are applied to everyone regardless of the position, the candidate’s age or their professional experience. If a company is looking for a 50-year-old chief financial officer and the interviewer asks how they would kill a crocodile with their bare hands, the candidate could quite reasonably tell the interviewer to go to hell, considering the question hugely disrespectful and a waste of time. In that case, the CFO could be the most competent professional around and still fail the interview.
Picture Cesar Alierta (Telefónica), Pablo Isla (Inditex) or Warren Buffett facing an interviewer who asks how many balls fit in a room. Or trying to show initiative and leadership in a group interview with five fresh university graduates. It would certainly be quite a show, and these renowned executives might well find themselves lost, despite being three people entirely capable of running a company.
Most of the people we interviewed say the new style of job interview is designed to hire someone, but probably works more as a way of sifting through candidates who are all perfectly qualified.
Featured image: Lance Cpl. Colton Brownlee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
