American View: How to (literally) keep your head in an interview

I’ve grown to loathe Mondays. Ever since my previous employer downsized my team in a routine restructuring, every Monday has become “apply for new gigs” day. After the dog and I have finished our first cup of coffee, I trawl through all the “alerts” in my inbox and scroll through the commercial and government job posting sites searching for matches.

I’ve grown to loathe Mondays. Ever since my previous employer downsized my team in a routine restructuring, every Monday has become “apply for new gigs” day. After the dog and I have finished our first cup of coffee, I trawl through all the “alerts” in my inbox and scroll through the commercial and government job posting sites searching for matches. Then, after flagging a dozen or so reasonable prospects, I prioritise a shortlist and settle into a rhythm of re-entering my CV data into yet another superfluous LMS’s web interface. By the time my darling wife comes home from her job late Monday afternoon, I’ll have completed anywhere from three and six hours of mind-numbing data entry and will have increased my active applications list by another half-dozen rows.

The thing is, it’s not just the redundant data entry that tanks my mood every Monday. The prospect of having to cheerfully whore myself out in yet another vacuous faux “screening” later in the week feels like nomming down on the contents of a 1970s disco ashtray: it’s all slag and despair. I accept that it’s a necessary start to the corpo courting process, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the soulless artificiality of it all. The prospect of fighting my way past an anonymous HR staffer who (a) doesn’t know the job, (b) isn’t affected by the selection, and (c) can’t care less who gets the gig is exhausting.

For the record, I love interviewing. Admittedly, I like interviewing more when I’m on the hiring side of the encounter. Still, auditioning for gigs can be fun, too … if you get to cross rhetorical blades with a clever and engaged opposite number. Those interviews are SO FREAKING FUN … ooohhhhhhh, yeah! I m,ean it: a great interview is a thing of beauty. The sort of interpersonal encounter that coworkers who weren’t in the room still talk about years later. That, however, rarely ever happens in the initial screen. That first phone call or email is almost always a perfunctory slog. Verify some biographic data, schedule the next call, try to not fall asleep. If you’re lucky you get passed up to the first level boss in a few weeks.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the process will get fun after you’re bested the gate guard. It’s been my experience that many corpo interviews are complete drek. About half of the “interviews” I’ve been subjected to have featured either a recitation of ancient call-and-response drills or else a pompous and overly clever came of obtuse riddles. Both are excruciating to sit through; I’ve walked out of such events after realising I could make better use of my time pulling weeds.

As an example of the first crap interview technique – call-and-response – the candidate’s sole purpose in the interview is to parrot canned answers to empty questions. It’s a liturgical drill, just like you’d experience in a church service. Every gotten bored with a priest chanting “The Lord by with you” and the throng chanting “and also with you” (or some variation on the same)? That’s exactly what the C&R interviewing technique does. For example, when the interviewer asks, “What is your greatest weakness?” … the candidate is expected to recite: “My greatest weakness is my unparalleled drive to succeed. I lock in and finish every job correctly without noticing that I’ve stayed late, long after all my peers have gone home.”

“I will sacrifice my health, my sanity, and my marriage for your glory, my queen!”

Both the question and the gag-inducing fake answer are ritualistic nonsense. They’re a fraternity’s “secret handshake” exchange. Bog-standard stupid question, bog-standard stupid answer. The candidate isn’t being evaluated, they’re being validated. “You have demonstrated that you know the Business 101 pass phrase. You may continue to the next fake question.” [scroimiting.wav]

I believe a realistic and useful answer to such a question might go something like this: “Why do you care what my ‘greatest weakness’ is? Are you hiring a cybersecurity engineer or a superhero? Are you concerned that accidental exposure to Kryptonite might impair my ability to generate PowerPoint slides that no one will ever read? What do you think you want for this position? Let’s talk about that and see if we have any common ground. Otherwise, you’re wasting everyone’s time … something I find unprofessional, immature, and embarrassingly ignorant.”

Have I answered such a C&R challenge like this? Yes. Yes, I have. Did I get the job afterwards? No, I didn’t … and that didn’t bother me at all. The way I see it, if you can’t treat candidates like adult human beings in the interview – the courting process – then working for you will be excruciating. No thanks.

When I’m interviewing folks, I prefer to ask open questions like “Based on what you know now, what do you think is the most compelling reason to not accept an offer for this role?” There’s no “right” answer; there can’t be. It’s entirely personal and based on factors that – 99% of the time – won’t come up in a “standard” interview. I want to hear a candidate’s honest assessment so we can either address their concerns up front or negotiate a mutually acceptable solution to mitigate the problem(s).

“Oh, you must leave by 3 pm every day to pick up your kid from school? Yeah, of course! What’s the point of working if your family suffers? Would you prefer a modified work schedule? Or maybe a break so you can finish your last hour of each workday remotely? Or something else?”

The other crap interview technique– the obtuse riddle game – is the technique most likely to eviscerate an interviewer. This is, for the record, the insufferable technique that led me to write one of my all-time favourite columns – Stuff Your Giraffe – back in 2013. That one column motivated me to write Why Are You Here?, the book I referenced at the top of this article. If you haven’t already, give it a skim.

You wouldn’t selfishly leave the titular giraffe alone and unprotected, would you?!?

Anyway, the riddle game used to be functionally identical to the call-and-response game. The interviewer describes an incomplete and sketchy “logic puzzle” and the candidate is then supposed to articulate the “correct” solution to it as if anything being discussed was either relevant or meaninfgul. For example, “how do you get a predator, a prey animal, and a food item across a river?” ^[1] and the “how do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?” running gag. I despise these *#&*%@$ games.

Depending on who you ask, these exercises are intended to accomplish one or more of four objectives:

Make the candidate anxious so they’ll blurt out something they shouldn’t
Evaluate the candidate’s ability to remain cool under pressure
See if the candidate can visualise the problem from multiple perspectives
Deflate the candidate’s confidence so they’ll be more receptive to a low offer

Personally, I believe these objectives are all horse manure. The only “value” I’ve ever noticed coming out of one of these exercises was to fill the person asking the “question” with a sense of smug superiority. My take is that it’s gamesmanship, not evaluation. It’s playing silly games when you can and should be pursuing vital information about a candidate’s fitness to fill a role, Shiela!

Ahem. Playing “I’m-smarter-than-you” games in an interview is a surefire way to get despised. It discourages your candidates and is likely to sour them into ignoring all your future attempts at communication. It’s indulgent, it’s insulting, it’s damned near infantilising, and it’s utterly bereft of value. DON’T. DO. THIS!

The life you save will definitely be your own.

The last few times an interviewer has pulled one of these obtuse riddle games on me I’ve reacted … strongly. No, I’ve never literally bludgeoned anyone senseless for doing this (somehow). I have, however, been painfully direct about how I felt about my time being wasted:

“What does this question have to do with the role or my fitness to perform it? Go on, explain your reasoning. How often am I expected to transport livestock across rivers in a canoe during a typical fiscal quarter? Will this activity involve hazard pay since you want me to work with undomesticated wolves? Are rabies vaccinations optional or mandatory? When was the last time that you performed this task to company standards? Can you explain how this contributes to the organisation’s bottom line? How does it serve to your corporate values?”

Usually, the smart interviewers will sound retreat and move on. The masochists try to justify their nonsense. That doesn’t play with me.

On getting the “it’s a mandatory question” dodge, I submit that the only reasonable response should be caustic snark. Condescending questions deserve scathing non-answers, like so:

‘If you insist … The most practical approach to getting the tiger, the wombat, and the kumquat across the river is to immediately drown the wombat so you can row the tiger and the kumquat across in one go. You can easily buy a replacement wombat from the marsupial vending machine waiting on the opposite bank.” ^[2]

*sigh*

This, then, is what I’m most discombobulated about every Monday. It’s not the exhausting searches or the boring data entry tasks. Those are just a nuisance. It’s the prospect of having to metaphorically cross swords with some ennui-tabix from HR that’s been infatuated with their own intellectual magnificence since they stumbled across a clever logic game in a LinkedIn post. The job hunt process is demoralising in the best of times; to make it dehumanising as well – during a massive economic downturn, no less – is infuriating.

^[1] Shantnu Tiwari deftly skewered this and several other nonsense logic games over on Python for Engineers back in 2021.
^[2] If you’re feel like you reconise the origins of this joke, you’re probably right: it’s a play on the “shoot the hostage” gag from Speed (1994).