Most-hated job interview questions
If you’re ever in a position to be interviewed by Elon Musk for a job at Tesla or SpaceX, chances are he’ll ask you this: “You’re standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?”
According to Ashlee Vance, who wrote the Musk-authorized biography “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” most candidates come up with the correct answer — the North Pole. But Musk will then ask where else it could be? Few can come up with option two, which, Vance shares in his book, is somewhere close to the South Pole, where, if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the Earth becomes one mile.
And if the thought of being in an interview with Musk sounds exhausting, you’re not alone. Resume.io, a résumé-building platform, recently did a survey to find out theworst questions candidates are asked, and the first one was an unusual one such as Musk’s.
Theworst offenders
“Howmany gas stations are there in the United States?” was ranked the hardest question to answer.
“It’s a bit of a trick question,” says Rolf Bax, chief human resources officer at Resume.io. “Unless you’re interviewing for
BP, your interviewer doesn’t really need this figure. Rather, they want to see how you think.”
Vance writes that “(Musk) tends to care less about whether or not the person gets the answer than about howthey describe the problem and their approach to solving it.”
Another question candidates dislike is when they’re given a challenge like this: “You have one minute to persuade me to buy this pen.”
“The interviewer is not intending to confuse them,” Bax says. “Instead, they are trying to learn howwell they execute common sales tactics— howthey gather, respond and deliver information about the pen, aswell as howwell they conclude the pitch with a persuasive statement.”
Acommon question that is also hard to answer: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
“Most people don’t have a five-year life plan, but that doesn’t matter,” Bax says. “What the interviewer wants to knowis two main things. The first is your commitment to the company— in otherwords, are you going to stick around for the next five years? The second is about your ambition. If you’re being hired as an assistant, do you see yourself as an executive or a manager in five years? You probably should.”
What is your biggest weakness? And why should we hire you? Both of these questions were listed as being hard to answer. They’re also more often asked of women than men.
“Women are expected to prove their worth in job interviews,” Bax says. “They are more commonly asked about their strengths and weaknesses, and even why they should be hired.”
Howto prepare
There are some questions that candidates can prepare for, Bax says.
“For example, answers to questions like ‘Where do you see yourself in five years? and ‘What is your biggest weakness?’ can be devised before the interview, no matter what the role or industry is,” he says. “Those that are much harder to prepare for are the random on-the-spot style questions.”
To practice a sales-driven challenge, such as “Sell me this pen,” Bax suggests focusing on positive features of the item. And to determine howmany gas stations, Starbucks or any other type of business could be in the United States, come up with a methodical solving process that you could later explain to the interviewer. For example, guess howmany gas stations could be in each state, multiply that number by 50, and increase the number for states where you know there’s a higher population.
The overarching theme of these questions is one that attempts to dig deeper into the psyche of the interviewee, Bax says.
“Difficult questions are divided between thought experiments like the gas stations and relatively sensible but tough real-world inquiries,” he says. “Both types of questions put the candidate on the spot to check their thought process. Some of them may seem daunting, but showing a calm, methodical approach is, in most cases, more important than the actual answer.”