There are plenty of pointless questions in job interviews, and some of them get you nowhere. The question “Where do you see yourself in five years?”, however, is one of the most common in interviews, and this one, you could say, really is a very useful question. So, to find the right way to answer it, we first need to put ourselves in the interviewer’s shoes and try to understand why they ask it.
First of all, faced with the question “Where do you see yourself in five years?”, let’s look at the wrong way to answer.
The wrong way to answer “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Most candidates assume the interviewer asks this question looking for a commitment from the candidate to and for the company. In other words, as a way for the recruiter to make sure that the candidate will be loyal to the company and isn’t planning to leave after two years for another company that better fits the candidate’s goals.
But that approach is wrong.
Only an idiot would expect loyalty from a candidate who hasn’t even joined the company. So answers along the lines of “I see myself building a long-term career with this company” or “I see myself as a manager at this company” show very little sincerity on the candidate’s part, because you don’t even know whether you’ll like working for that company. You don’t know it yet.
What should a recruiter be looking for when asking this question?
Recruiters often ask this question without being clear themselves about what the right answer would be, and the truth is that there is no right answer.
A smart recruiter (bearing in mind that intelligence is a luxury in many cases in the world of recruitment) would use this question only to make sure they have in front of them a candidate who has thought about their goals and aims in life. In other words, it’s a mistake to use this question to tie the answer to the company in question.
In fact, your working future, your career, doesn’t depend on the company you’re applying to. The recruiter doesn’t even know where they’ll be in five years. Nor do they know whether the company will still be standing in five years, so any answer that draws a parallel between a future career goal and a company you haven’t even started working for would show not loyalty but enormous stupidity and recklessness.
What are valid answers to “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
There’s no single valid answer. As an interviewer, any answer would do for me if it showed that the candidate has some clear goals and objectives they want to achieve in the medium term, professionally and even personally.
Any answer that steers clear of complacency and shows a minimum of professional ambition is valid.
Good companies want to hire someone who wants to build a career with the company, and ideally someone who will retire with them. And the candidate, likewise, is looking for a company that will help them build a career there.
So whatever answer we give, it should come with a “counter-question” along the lines of: “What will you offer me, and how will you help me develop professionally so that in five years I’m still working for this company?”
And this is the point where recruiter and candidate will find out who’s who, because I’d remind the new generation of recruiters of something they often forget: the company selects candidates, but in the end it’s also the candidate who chooses the company they want to work for.
Further reading
- 15 curious things that can affect whether you get hired
- How to answer the question “What’s your greatest weakness?”
- HR directors share the most common reasons they reject candidates
Featured image: Cbaile19, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
