JOB INTERVIEWS THE JOBS WAY

Before Jobs got to the stage of interviewing potential employees, candidates had already undergone a vigorous selection process. Applicants needed to demonstrate exceptional personal and professional qualities, with first-rate recommendations also highly valued.

Having made it to interview, candidates could expect a thorough grilling, all done with typical Jobs idiosyncrasy. He used the process to test just how quickly candidates could think on their feet. A classic Apple interview question, for instance, was: ‘How might you go about investigating a technology without giving away to anyone that you are investigating it?’ Such puzzlers soon separated the wheat from the chaff.

Jobs would also expect an encyclopaedic knowledge of Apple, its products and its ethos. He delved into the interviewees’ personalities, too, asking open-ended questions such as: ‘Why are you here?’ On occasion he could be remarkably cruel. In one infamous interview during his initial spell at Apple, he barracked a candidate he had not taken to, interrupting the interviewee’s answers by murmuring: ‘Gobble, gobble, gobble’. Furthermore – and presumably in contravention of significant chunks of employment law – Jobs demanded to know when the interviewee had lost his virginity, if in fact he was still a virgin, and whether he had ever taken LSD.

At the end of the interview process, Jobs carefully considered all the data he had accumulated on the candidate but made his final decision based on gut instinct. Of course, few interviewees got to a one-to-one with the boss without the requisite technical abilities – but would they actually fit into the Apple organization? Would they put the company first? These were the key questions, and only a select band made the grade.