You are about to make an important decision regarding the hiring of a new employee and the time has come for the critical face-to-face meeting. If you could choose a single question to ask the potential new employee from the following 10 questions, which wouldyou choose?
1. Why should I hire you? 2. What do you see yourself doing five years from now? 3. What do you consider to be your greatest strengths and weaknesses? 4. How would you describe yourself? 5. What college subject did you like the best and the least?
6. What do you know about our company? 7. Why did you decide to seek a job with our company? 8. Why did you leave your last job?9. What do you want to earn five years from now? 10. What do you really want to do in life?
This list of the job interview questions was compiled by Allen Huffcutt from Bradley University. They are the most commonly asked in all interviews by interviewers convinced of their own originality.
What questions one, three and four have in common is the belief that asking interviewees to assess themselves will indeed produce some sort of useful information. But all of the interviewees I have ever asked about their greatest weakness have answered that they are perfectionists or that they work too hard. People are familiar with this type of question and their ‘correct’ answers are well prepared beforehand.
The next group of questions – two, nine and 10 – assume that interviewees are capable of predicting the future. But even if you are interviewing potential weather forecasters, you would be well served by placing little stock in their answers even if they are given in complete innocence, as people are poor predictors of the future – especially where their own destiny is concerned.
Most of us – amateur interviewers that we are – believe we are better judges of character than we actually are
The last group of questions – five, seven and eight – adopts the opposite approach and expects interviewees to possess abilities in historical analysis. But as is well known, when people address the past they tend to reconstruct it by making improvements upon it. Especially when the answer is importantto them.
Thus, the correct answer – that is, the question that is correct according to Huffcutt, who has spent years researching the topic – is question six. The reason? It is the only objective question based on a relevant fact – in this case, the amount of time the interviewee spent researching your company.
It is not, however, the best question. The best question is no question at all. Most of us – amateur interviewers that we are – believe we are better judges of character than we actually are. We blindly follow a long series of biases, from experience in locating what we have in common with the interviewee by placing too much importance on first impressions to classifying him or her too quickly by means of the stereotypes we carry around inside us.
The solution offered by Huffcutt is to avoid face-to-face interviews altogether and select candidates on the basis of more objective criteria, like work samples. If you are about to hire a graphic designer, have the person design something; if you are looking for a salesperson, ask the interviewee to sell you something. Job-knowledge tests, peer-ratings of past job performance and even simple intelligence tests are other, better means than interviews for assessing candidates.
Comparative research between many studies shows a low correlation between this type of interview and the interviewee’s actual success on the job. But most studies of this nature are skewed by the fact that those who did not pass the interview and were not hired are also not part of the study.
One such study, however, did manage to track the candidates who had been turned down. In 1979, 800 candidates were interviewed for admission to the University of Texas School of Medicine. The interviewers gave marks to every candidate on a scale of one to seven and selected the 350 highest scorers from the list.
But when the Texas state legislature unexpectedly requested that the school admit an additional 50 candidates, most had already been accepted to other institutions and so those admitted were from the bottom of the original list, applicants whose interview scores had placed them between 700 and 800 on the list.
No one in the medical school knew which students had been admitted from the top of the list and which from the bottom, nor what their scores had been. Thus, a rare situation was created in which interview techniques could be assessed, at least at the University of Texas. And how did the two groups of students differ? Theydidn’t! Both groups completed their studies and received their diplomas in equal proportions. Call it a post-mortem examination of the admission’s interview.
Jacob Burak is the founder of Alaxon, a digital magazine about culture, art and popular science.