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One Stupid Job Interview Too Many

"Tell me about a time where you had to fight off a feces-flinging 100 stone gorilla with your bare hands"

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I've worked in recruitment for 8 years. Every once in a while a gem of an email drops in to my inbox that makes me laugh for hours, normally from a frustrated job applicant who's emotionally scarred from too many tortuous interviews. Here's one I received this morning:

"The interview... frankly I don't care anymore after flunking two first-rounds in 2 weeks. Wonder what happened to the times I could walk blindfolded into a final assessment centre. "Competency" questions have become so ridiculous they ask questions like "Tell me about a time where you had to fight off a feces-flinging 100 stone gorilla with your bare hands". Even bloody indiana jones couldn't answer that truthfully. And everything you say will be scribbled down by some guy with a barely indheligibbil accent. FFS instead of me dumbing down my words, just hand me the 3$@% paper and I'll write it down for you. Then you can award me an "Achievement Badge" for handwriting.

Tomorrow if I get another dumb-ass interviewer I'm going all out to have fun. For "Teamwork" I'm going to say how I slept with all 12 members of my team within 3 days of working on a project. That's right. Girls and boys. God help him if he asks me to elaborate on Problem-Solving Skills. And I'll make sure he gets every last detail on paper since he's obliged to do so.

I could go on and on but this thing is just going to come back to me one day. "

I'd be interested to know what other people think about "competency" questions and whether they really are a good indication of someone's ability to do a job???

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Comments

13 July 2011

Haha hilarious Nic, you sister should have got the job with that answer! Have you seen the google interview questions: http://www.businessinsider.com/15-google-interview-questions-that-will-make-you-feel-stupid-2010-11

Anonymous

I can't say I'm keen on competency questions but so long as they're actually relevant to the position, I can't complain about them. Creating some ridiculous situation and asking me how I'd get myself out of it will test my imagination but not in such a way that's ever going to be of any benefit to the company. Give me a small problem that the company has faced or is facing and ask me to solve it or something like that. Then, at least, the interviewer would see how my imagination could benefit the company.

But at the same time, I agree with Sian. I'd take the most ridiculous competency question over the "What animal/vegetable/mineral would you be" variety. I've not had any of those as of yet but my sister got this genius question during her graduate jobs hunt:

"Which character from Friends would you be?"

That has to be one of the most stupid from this particular breed of stupid questions. What was to say that she'd even seen Friends, never mind being famiilar enough to compare herself with one of the characters?

She didn't get it. Although it was probably something to do with the fact that she told the interviewer that she'd never seen Friends and then asked how the question pertained to the job.

Nic

9 August 2010

Competency questions are only useful if they are used to dig deeper into some areas of the candidate's past experience. However, training for such questions has become such a developed industry that it is very difficult to distinguish between genuine answers and fairy tales.
It may not be a bad idea to ask one or two intelligent behavioural questions during the course of the interview, but anything more than that would become counterproductive.

Philip Lloyd

15 July 2010

They asked if you were a "fruit"? That sounds offensively homophobic...

Eugene Liew

I don't love them either, but agree with Yun Liu that formative competency questions are OK, but only a couple - the interviewer shouldn't need to ask 5 competency questions!

Anyway give me a competency question any day over ones like this (which my friend got in her PWC interview a few years ago):

If you were a fruit, which fruit would you be and why?

I mean PLEASE...what could the interviewer possibly want from that -
"I'd be an orange, because oranges are good at maths?" I think in the end she actually came up with something pretty clever.

I think that interviewers ask stupid questions because they're struggling more and more to differentiate between CV's - everyones got amazing grades and qualifications and everyones read the book 'interviews for dummies'.

Sian Fleming-Jones

c'mon people. with that attitude he/she didn't deserve the job anyway! competency interviews were designed for a reason: to weed out weeds like that. the system works.

Jason Ong

6 July 2010

So funny!!

Benjamin Baillou

5 July 2010

I personally think that it depends on the style of competency questions. They do vary from company to company. I prefer the formative competency questions rather than some 'creative' questions. The thing is formative competency question is more likely to be a good indicator for employee's future performance. In order to answer formative questions, applicants have to list real experiences to prove he has this ability. It is also easier for employers to decide whether this person can fit in this company or not.