Sometimes I take the bait and I read some form of rage post talking about the interviewing process. There is always one thread that kills me. Recently I saw a post that was basically “This isn’t relative to the job I am interviewing for, why are they wasting my time?”

Now I expect there are plenty of interviews where the interviewer is wasting your time. When I think of this, I go back to my father interviewing for a job with a county government entity. He was in the final two after lots of interviewing processes. Then somehow he found out that that… well… the competition was someone’s friend or relative. The other person was “good enough” so he didn’t get the position. (It worked out for him in the end, but I remember him not being happy.

I have also heard there are lots of job openings that really don’t exist. These are either scams (using the classic meaning of the word, not the catch all for any thing, process, etc that doesn’t suit your desires or that you didn’t read the bolded fine print about), or just jobs that are almost certainly going to be filled internally but they are going through the motions due to some law or internal requirement.

But what I am talking about are people who say they were asked some question that the people deemed a waste of time.

Is anything really off limits?

When interviewing someone, there are plenty of questions you can’t/shouldn’t ask. For simplicity’s sake, I will stick to a typical, for-profit entity set or rules, but most of these apply to most non-profits except in some specific, well understood by both parties before the interview starts:

• Family details
• Medical details (not applicable to position, for example “this job requires you to carry 50 pounds around 8 hours a day”)
• Race
• Creed
• Beliefs
• Pretty much anything personal
• Anything you have been told to not ask by your company

This doesn’t mean you need to stick to the same basic questions as everyone asks. This Linkedin post (which started me punishing my iPad keyboard) was questioning the value of a “ambush” question like:

“You are given an elephant and you can’t give it away or sell it, what would you do with the elephant?”

Personally, I loved this question. After you have gotten to the point where you think this person could be worth working with, throw them something out of left field and see where they go with it.

Also, be careful that your questons aren’t just sneaky ways to ask those out of bounds questions.

Why?

You are hiring a person, not a machine/bot. One of the hardest things to find out during an interview is what people are thinking when something interesting occurs.

There are the common questions like:

• “What is your biggest weakness?” “I tend to say yes to every project and end up completing everything so fast my coworkers get bored”
• “Tell me a non-verifiable story using non-verifiable software when you made a non-verifiable mistake or failure that you make sound like it was practically nothing” “Well, I invented AI.”
• “Tell me about your biggest failure.” “I once worked so hard I didn’t eat for two days and ended up in the hospital”

Just today when I was perusing LinkedIn I found this post: The one way to answer these five interview question. Commenters disagreed some, but it is true that you have to be careful with certain questions because interviewers have preconcieved notions of what each question is.

The best part of the interview is improv

I don’t know the details/methods of improv as an entertainment for, but every interview is basically a kind of improv session where a lot of the time, the interviewers/interviewed are jockeying back and forth down a path. You asl a question, they answer, then you pick something out of their answer that was right (or wrong, which is a lot more fun and can be really telling, and toss it back to them until the topic is run dry and you start another set of questions. Think of it as the serious version of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?“.

There are obvious scripted questions and any seasoned pro is going to have these at least somewhat ready for an interview. Maybe even memorized or for virtual interviews taped on the monitor where the meeting is going on. A bit of sponteniety is quite helpful to make the interviewer happy with the results, but you shouldn’t go in cold or just start singing the Money Song from Monty Python when asked why you want the job.

So to get an idea of the candidate’s true character, why not a question they not only don’t expect, but literally couldn’t expect? A question like the elephant one can just be a fun one. See if they make a joke, turn out to be an honesty/attitude question. Or a process/organization question if they start explaining how they would use and feed the aforementioned elephant.

Or maybe just a “let’s see if they can handle when weird stuff happens”. Goodness I don’t know what people who take a job to do one thing and haven’t read the “and other duties as required” clause are thinking.

Sometimes crazy stuff happens and you have to handle crazy stuff. Whether the person gives a funny answer (like dyeing that aforementioned elephant white around the holidays), or takes it really seriously (I don’t have space for an elephant. Why is this happening? My current living situation doesn’t allow cats, much less a pachyderm of any age).

In any case, you will learn something interesting about the person without asking personal questions, and that is one of the points of the interview. To decide if you, as the interviewer, want to have this person’s work with you for the next 1-30 years.

Interviews are about learning about the candidate, and it is easier when you don’t ask them “what is your best quality”.

My favorite weird imrpov question

One of my favorite ways to break the ice in an interview is to scan the person’s resume and find something to ask, usually unrelated to the current position. I look for something on their resume that they haven’t used for a long long time and ask how they used it. It is a lot better if I also used this product, but as every interviewee should know. It is mostly an ice breaker to maybe talk about something we have in common

This is usually a good way to get the discussion started, laugh a bit about some ancient tech , and how things have improved. Patterns of use sometime lead from there, discussing how they like to learn. This is usually the most fun part of the interview because no one case if any of it is technically correct.

But note I said “usually”.

What follows is a true story. The names have been left out to protect the innocent (and because I can’t remember what day it is most of the time). I had this resume once and I was scanning it and see some tech I had used 15 years earlier. I could not remember a lick about this tool, but I dare say that anything I have worked with I could remember by name, if just a big “oh yeah!” This goes 200% for anything still listed on my resume.

I see this product I used on my very first professional (in the getting paid aspect only) so I am kind of excited because it is the first person to have used this tool I have met. This was a Mac-based database platform called Acius 4th Dimension so when I see this on the person’s resume in a list of software they were proficient with, my curiosity is piqued.

So I ask, “tell me about what you used with Acius 4th Dimension for.” At this point, I got the most awkward reply I have ever heard.

“What is that?”

I honestly didn’t have a clue what to say at that point that didn’t sound at least a bit condescending. So I just said. “It’s on your resume, and it was something you listed as having used.”

Then this person said something along these lines, I kid you not. “I don’t know that that is, I don’t think I have worked with that.” Like I said, you learn all sorts of things by asking off-the-cuff questions, some of it not good.

Enjoy the light part of the interview

It is fine to be mad when you are ghosted. It is fine to be mad when you go through a lot of interviews over and over. A long time ago, I got turned down for reasons that had just changed at a company (and several of my interviewers left the company soon after I finally got the reply.) I am still sort of miffed by that, so I get how the process is a nightmare.

Let me also add that the concept of being interviewed by an AI that looks like a human is definitely a dystopian nightmare of some sort. A tech interview like a certification exam adjusting questions around with finite answers, presenting them in text (or spoken if reading/seeing the screen), fine. But the videos I have seen makes nightmares seem kind of awesome. If an AI starts asking me questions that are not related to the job, I am sure I am out right there too.

But when a real human asks you an off topic question, enjoy it for what it is. Just a way to see how you will react and it might even be possible make a friend in the future. Someone telling me they plan to work at my company for the rest of their life means nothing. They have a price, i have a price. If you ae reading this and are thinking “Louis might be interesting for a position” reach out, but my price is set pretty darn high right now.

Just remember, people usually don’t waste a lot of time when they are interviewing. So you don’t start spending time accessing fun personality questions if you don’t already kind think the person is worth it.