South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Most-hated job interview questions
If you’re ever in a position to be interviewed by ElonMusk for a job atTesla or SpaceX, chances are he’ll ask you this: “You’re standing on the surface of the Earth. Youwalk onemile south, one milewest and onemile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?”
According to Ashlee Vance, who wrote theMusk-authorized biography “ElonMusk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” most candidates come upwith the correct answer — theNorth Pole. ButMusk will then askwhereelse it couldbe? Fewcan come upwith option two, which, Vance shares in his book, is somewhere close to the South Pole, where, if youwalk one mile south, the circumference of the Earth becomes one mile.
And if the thought of being in an interviewwithMusk 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 theUnited States?” was ranked the hardest question to answer.
“It’s a bit of a trick question,” says Rolf Bax, chief human resources officer atResume.io. “Unless you’re interviewing for BP, your interviewer doesn’t really need this figure. Rather, they want to see howyou 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 iswhen 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 pitchwith 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 interviewerwants 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 biggestweakness? Andwhy shouldwe hire you? Both of these questionswere listed as being hard to answer. They’re alsomore often asked of women than men.
“Women are expected to prove theirworth in job interviews,” Bax says. “They are more commonly asked about their strengths andweaknesses, and evenwhy they should be hired.”
Howtoprepare
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 biggestweakness?’ can be devised before the interview, no matterwhat 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 theUnited States, come up with amethodical 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 knowthere’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 themmay seem daunting, but showing a calm, methodical approach is, inmost cases, more important than the actual answer.”