JOB INTERVIEWS ARE consistently scary affairs: You are being judged professionally, and it’s easy to feel you’re being judged as a person too.
Almost everyone feels invalidated when things don’t pan out. And then every year you read something about the “stupid questions” employers ask, questions like:
“How many children are born every day?”
“If you were asked to unload a 747 full of jelly beans, what would you do?”
“Why are manholes round?”
“What kind of tree would you like to be and why?”
How the hell do you answer questions like these? How do such questions help employers make good hiring decisions? Actually, most of these questions aren’t as whack-a-doodle as they might sound, and yes, they do all have answers.
We live in a post-industrial era alternatively known as “the Knowledge Era,” “the Digital Age,” “the Information Age,” and other names. What they all convey is that our jobs increasingly speak to the analysis, manipulation, and movement of information. This makes our analytical and processing abilities increasingly important to potential employers. Some of us have these skills naturally, and some of us don’t; however, we can all increase our analytical and processing skills.
If you are thoroughly engaged in your profession and take an interest in the world around you, answering these mind-boggling questions will become much easier and you will become a smarter person. Successful and interesting people consistently engage with professional journals, podcasts, and blogs that focus on issues relating to their profession from a global standpoint, from business and creative perspectives, and from cutting-edge strategic innovations.
Reading, watching, and listening with intent like this will keep you informed about all the larger issues of your professional arena, the world in which it operates, and its great influencers. This will make you a more competent professional with a far wider frame of reference for any issue you face. It will also make you a more interesting colleague for others who share the same commitment. You’ve heard of these people before; they all belong to the Inner Circle we talk about in the context of Knock ’em Dead professional growth strategy.
It is also useful to engage in analytical thinking as an integral part of your day by doing things that make you think and feed your mind. Here are a few ideas:
• Watch Jeopardy! It is on TV every night and it’s thirty minutes of brainteasers. Hell for a week or two because you feel like such a dummy, but then addictive, fun, and educational.
• Read The New Yorker magazine online or in print. Killer cartoons and comprehensive coverage of everything from technology to the arts. Read this magazine for a year and you can walk into a reception at the White House and hold conversations with anyone. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get the point.
• Lumosity.com is a brain-training website that develops your cognitive skills with puzzles and games.
The point of all this is that these seemingly absurd questions are invariably conceived with a purpose: to evaluate intelligence, analytical, and processing skills as they relate to individual and team performance. We’ll start with the easy ones.
I’ve never heard it asked and never communicated with anyone who has been asked it, so this one may well be apocryphal, but people claim that it is asked, so what would you say? Think through all the building blocks of the Knock ’em Dead approach, things like:
• Think with your professional hat on
• The values and behaviors most valued by employers
• As a manager what makes a good team member
With these thoughts in mind imagine yourself to be a hiring manager asking this question. What are you be thinking? You’re wondering about all the obvious issues surrounding skills and the deliverables of the job, and you’re wondering about a candidate’s values and how she sees herself. With this in mind it isn’t really very hard to come up with a reasonable answer.
Remembering that interviews are focused on evaluating the professional you, it might be worth skipping ahead to Chapter 21 (“How to Ace the Psychological Tests”), which addresses how employers use aptitude and psychological evaluation as part of the selection process.
Put yourself across the desk. It is easy to see that asking, “How do you see yourself?” is likely to generate a canned answer. But by asking the question in an unusual way you throw the candidate off-guard, and you are likely to get a more revealing answer. This is the thinking that leads interviewers to ask many of the very unsettling questions discussed in this chapter.
In developing ideas for what your answer might be, focus on the behaviors and values that are relevant to your profession and that (in our example) might be applied to a tree—I know this sounds mighty strange but just bear with me and it will all start to make sense.
Enough theory already; let’s get to an answer. Determine a tree onto which you can apply professional values and transferable skills, something like this:
“I would like to be an American live oak. It is strong with a deep root system that keeps it steady, and it survives no matter what the weather. It doesn’t matter what you throw at it (even lightning bolts); the live oak can and does take it. Living more than 200 years, it is reliable and provides support and sustenance to many different plants and animals, and its permanence supplies shade and shelter to anyone who needs it.
“It is strong, substantial, deep, reliable, and is always a good landmark.”
“Oh, and it never sheds all its leaves, so I’d have a head of hair no matter what ;-).”
And you end with a smile (don’t use the tag line if the interviewer is bald or thinning unless you too are follically challenged).
Even a crazy-ass question like this can be answered if you know what is important to your work and to being a productive team player. In fact, all these seemingly crazy questions have roots in these considerations, because that is what is important to a hiring manager: Find someone who can do the job, play well with others, and not give me headaches.
This question examines logic and analytical skills. Asked in the context of a job that deals with design, building, or manufacturing, it also examines spatial intelligence and your understanding of basic design principles. Manhole covers are round because:
• Rectangular manhole covers can fall into the hole
• Round manhole covers cannot fall into the manhole
• Rectangular manhole covers have to be aligned to fit back into the manhole once work is completed
• Round manhole covers don’t need to be aligned
• Manhole covers are made of cast iron and are incredibly heavy—if you have to move a heavy object you can either lift it or roll it; rectangular covers have to be lifted to be moved
• Round covers don’t have to be lifted and can be rolled
In making these points in an answer you demonstrate analytical skills that nail the problems, causes, and solutions. If you ever face this question, answer it with pleasure in your voice over the elegant simplicity of the design and the very real problem it solves. Your answer will be correct, and your tone of voice will show that you appreciate such thinking.
Who can answer this question and how they reply to it holds the solution to how you should approach it.
The only people who can readily answer this question are people who love absorbing information for its own sake; people who are attuned to what is going on in their profession and with an interest in the activities and figures who help make the world a better place—exactly what we have been talking about previously.
Why you give the answer you do is just as important as your answer itself.
There are 573 Nobel prize winners in six categories (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, Economic Sciences). Consequently, I don’t think the interviewer will necessarily know if you actually named three Nobel prize winners.
Now, if you just give names, you will probably be asked for your reasoning, so this is one of those questions where you want to forestall further questions and get onto the next topic ASAP. I’d recommend a response and a reason, for example: “Alfred Nobel—he invented dynamite and then left his fortune to making amends via the Nobel Prize. Nelson Mandela, because of all he did to achieve racial equality and peaceful resolution of conflict. Marie Curie, for her discovery of radium and all the implications of that for our modern society.”
You tell me, are these all Nobel Prize winners? I honestly don’t know. But who cares? The answer shows wide knowledge covering divergent fields and speaks to desirable behaviors and values: getting along with people, finding peaceful resolutions to conflict, making a change for good.
We now come to questions that everyone asks about what you would do in different situations. The key to answering them all is showing that when presented with a challenge, you automatically examine it from different perspectives (evaluating the upside and downside of each) before offering a solution.
Let’s start with a question that managers from the grocery chain Trader Joe’s are famous for asking candidates:
This is not about mentioning their products; it is, of course, about how you decide what to serve. So you’d ask about food allergies, refreshment preferences, dietary restrictions for religious or other reasons, favorite and least favorite foods. Then you’d devise a menu and run it by the manager’s administrative assistant to double-check the choices before you started implementation. You’d even go a little further and ask about environmental allergies—so you have time to put those ten cats outside and vacuum your home.
This one sometimes gets asked by product managers for high-tech companies, as well as evangelist sales and marketing positions. Again it is not so much the answer as your reasoning. You might say, “If I were invisible no one would see what I am doing, which would be a negative, and I could also be perceived as deceptive. On the other hand, flying? That’s going to get anyone’s attention, plus you can get much more done.”
A variation of this question is, “If you could be a superhero, who would you be?” Your answer can be the same—just give a name to the dude that can fly, and no, it’s not Mighty Mouse.
There is no right answer. I checked this out online and found hundreds of pages of people arguing this issue—go figure. Marc Hughes, the film critic at Forbes, has been quoted as saying, “It’s impossible to accurately answer a question about comic book characters.” So what do you say? I’d quote Marc Hughes in response to this question.
Cinderella, Esmeralda, Rapunzel . . . there have to be a hundred of them. Who knows and who even cares? All that matters is that you have a name and a reason. Fortunately, princesses are usually sickeningly perfect, so pick a name, any name, and align her behaviors and values with behaviors and values we talk about elsewhere in the book. The important thing is to show you think about the answer and that the answer you give reveals something about the professional you.
This one is about listening and analytical skills. So you turn the challenge into questions: “I would ask whether or not you can experience colors; what colors you do you ‘see.’ I’d ask how you experience each of these colors. With this information I can identify how you cognitively experience color and also understand the vocabulary you use to express your understanding. This would give me the base data to evaluate and turn into metaphors that you’re most likely to interpret accurately.”
Any eight-year-old kid can answer this, but we adults have forgotten what the undersides of chairs and tables look like. With that change of viewpoint as we got older, we lost the fantasy and invention that went with being short (remember underneath that table, when it was a cave, a fort, a tepee?). We also lose our sense of wonder and creativity.
The question poses a fantasylike situation. Once you work your way into it, the question becomes an exercise in basic logic. You’ll kick yourself if you haven’t worked out the answer: “A pencil is about seven inches long, and a blender runs six to twelve inches tall on the inside and rarely more than five inches across at the mouth. If I were shrunk small enough to fit in a blender it would mean that my legs would still be long enough to reach out and brace against the sides; gradually I could work my way up a few inches until I could reach the lip and haul myself out.”
Unless you are a numismatist you won’t know this one, which is perhaps why the only known occurrences of this question occur in financial houses. This is a question that inquires into a candidate’s involvement with the arcane details of coins and money.
The ridges around the outside of some coins are called reeded edges, and they are there to:
• Make counterfeiting that much more difficult.
• Prevent theft and fraud. Look at any old gold or silver coins without reeded edges and you will see that many of them have tiny slivers of the gold or silver shaved off. The precious metal was stolen and the coin then fraudulently passed on at its face value. Reeded edges were invented to prevent this theft and fraud when our coinage was gold and silver based.
Always look for what is behind the question: A plane crash is a disaster and by applying the question to the workplace you can translate it this way: Things go wrong in the best-run departments, and the interviewer wants to know about your reactions to stress. Your answer, then, should be about remaining calm under stress, taking calmly considered actions that exhibit leadership, creativity, practicality, and logic.
First of all you display common sense: For safety you get yourself away from the wreckage and regroup. What do you need? Water, shelter, communication, and heat, so you return to the wreckage and search for water, food, clothing or other coverings, lighters, and matches.
Most problematic is going to be finding matches or lighters because of security regulations, so you look for emergency supplies that exist in every cabin and look for the carry-on baggage of the flight crew. As you do these things, you look for signs of life.
Next you withdraw and decide on where you will establish a base of operations: somewhere that offers defense against the elements and predators. In short you stay calm enough to make sensible decisions that can help resolve a bad situation.
It’s about how well you listen to the question, which is not how you would do it but what you would do. This means the short answer is, “I’d do it.” But the smart candidate would answer, “I’d do it of course, but I’d want to do the best job possible as efficiently as possible so I’d want to know where the jelly beans are to be moved to, how they are packed now, if I need to be concerned about repackaging, and the time by which the task needs to be completed.”
“Next I’d want to get onsite and evaluate the problem firsthand and discover what resources are available to help execute the task—equipment, people, and money.”
You’d finish with something along the lines of, “Then I’d devise a plan of attack that would deliver the desired outcome in the time available. From there I would roll up my sleeves and start work, constantly evaluating and revising as I went along.”
We started the chapter with discussion of taking an interest in the world around you, and that answering these mind-boggling questions will become much easier if you do.
You might not know the answer but you can think of global associations involved with the well-being of children and say that you would consult these resources. Incidentally, UNICEF estimates 353,000 children are born a day. That’s 225 a minute or 4.3 babies every second.
This is a question that seeks your ability to think like your customer so that you can deliver what that customer needs; it also requires you to think of cost of solutions from the company perspective.
There are a number of common-sense approaches to this question. You want to suggest some options and a means of evaluating them. Since it all begins with the customer, you would want to know what suggestions blind people have? You could create a focus group to generate some starter ideas and ask participants to enrich their suggestions.
Perhaps the most utilitarian approach is already in use:
• Most often used
• Less frequent but necessary
• Hot and spicy
Blind people can read and write so three broad categories based on usage that incorporates an alphabetical system coupled with peel-off braille stickers would certainly be a front-runner. Finally, you’d need to construct a cabinet to hold the spices and their labels, one without any sharp edges or fittings that could cut or snag.
Behavioral questions (“Tell me about a time when . . . ”) examine past performance to predict future behaviors while situational questions (“What is the problem with this invoice?”) strive to confront candidates with typical on-the-job challenges.
There are also a limitless number of questions that examine analytical skills. You could face these types of questions in any job interview, but you are far more likely to face them if you work in professions that demand high analytical skills: Technology, Science, Research, Finance, Auditing, and Accounting. These and other statistics- and research-oriented occupations that demand superior analytical skills are the most likely to present you with seemingly odd questions.
Additionally, these questions are intended to examine your love of problem solving and the approaches to analytical examination that you have mastered.
Many of these questions, by their very nature (“How many windows are there in Seattle?”) have no definitively “correct” answer. How you explain your approach to answering the question or solving the proffered problem is just as important as any final answer you might offer. The interviewer is just as interested in how you define the problem and break it down into problems small enough that there are business, common-sense, and analytical tools available to process them.
These questions all require that you define the problem from different perspectives; in other words, stepping back from the challenge, examining what has to be achieved by whom, for whom, in what time frame, and the potholes to be avoided along the way.
Just like the “number of windows in Seattle,” no one knows. This question and others like it (some to follow) have become known as Fermi equations or estimates. A Fermi estimate seeks to quantify problems that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to actually measure.
Enrico Fermi was a physicist, who as Wikipedia says, was known for his ability to make good approximate calculations with little or no actual data. Fermi problems typically involve making logical guesstimates about the upper and lower ranges of likely quantities.
This type of estimate involves careful analysis of the problem to break it down into challenges that can be defined and therefore are more likely to be fairly accurately measured. In this instance we would need to know the number of households owning pianos, the number of public buildings housing pianos, the frequency with which pianos are typically tuned (usually on an annual basis), and how long a tuning takes (1–2 hours).
We should also know how many a single piano tuner could expect to tune in an average work week.
Such a series of rough estimates are then multiplied together (by some mathematical chicanery way above my pay grade) to deliver an answer that is within the bounds of reason. A Fermi estimate takes each of the considerations and turns them into a series of equations that will generate an answer that is within the right range without any claim to precise numerical accuracy.
Other Fermi questions might include, “How many basketball[s] can you fit in this room?” which poses the challenges of evaluating spheres fitting into rectangles. Or, “If you had a machine that produced $100 dollars for life, what would you be willing to pay for it today?” This would require estimates of life expectancy, expected standard of living, inflation, and cost of living based on locale. “How many cows are in the United States?” How do we break this down? How many states? How many farms per state? How many cows per farm, etc. Your answer would begin, “Let’s say there are . . . ”
There is an endless supply of Fermi-style questions. When you hear an incredibly complex question, you are likely facing a Fermi equation. Your initial challenge is to break it down into component challenges that are small and defined enough to be evaluated (even a dummkopf like me can do that), then depending on your mathematical abilities to go as deep into creating and solving the equations as your professional skills will allow.