It is very easy to forget that when you're interviewing a job-seeker, you aren't just evaluating him or her. You're also selling the candidate on working with you. Too many interviewers forget the selling part of the interview. They treat an interview as a one-way exercise, and by doing that they drive the best candidates away.
You can't treat a job-seeker like dirt and expect him or her to accept a job offer from your company. The best people have the most choices, and they won't stand for the lousy treatment that signals "If you come to work here, you'll fall in line and be exactly the person we want you to be."
It's a new day in the talent marketplace. People have options apart from your company. They could work for someone else or they could work for themselves.
If a job-seeker didn't have any choices apart from a job offer from you, would you still want to hire that person?
A great way to drive talented people away from your firm is to insult them with brainless and done-to-death job interview questions like "What's your greatest weakness?" and "Where do you see yourself in five years?"
A job interview is not a therapy session. It's not a date. You don't have the right to ask a job applicant about his or her innermost thoughts and feelings. Are you comfortable sharing your hopes and dreams and weaknesses with strangers? I hope not!
People don't have weaknesses, anyway -- only things that they do well and other things they don't care about. I don't know how to fix a problem with my car, so I take it to the mechanic (actually I ask my husband to take my car into the shop). Does that mean that auto repair is my weakness?
Also on Forbes:
It's 2015. It's past time we ditched the idiotic traditional job interview questions in favor of real, human conversations. We teach interviewers to ask very few questions on a job interview and talk about the job description and the company instead. It's not an oral exam, after all!
It's a simple conversation like a networking conversation over coffee. You as the interviewer will lay out the situation you're facing at your workplace and ask the job-seeker for his or her thoughts on your situation. Likewise, you'll encourage the job applicant to ask you anything he or she wants to know about the company and the job.
That's all! A job interview doesn't have to be stressful or intimidating. Why would we make it so? There's only one reason -- fear! Some interviewers believe that they have to be in the driver's seat. They'd be horrified if the job-seeker took an active role in guiding the conversation -- but why? That's your brain on fear. We have to be in control or we get panicked.
Here are five questions that will not insult your job applicants. You and they might have a lot of fun digging into these questions. Leave a comment and tell us what happens when you try these smarter interview questions out!
- Based on what you've heard and read about our company so far, what do you think it would be like to work here? How would this place be similar or different from the other jobs you've held?
- How do you see this job fitting into your career plans? What could you learn here that you haven't already mastered? Let me know if I can answer questions about that topic, too!
- What can I tell you about the work you'd be doing in this job, the department you'd be working in and the company in general?
- How do you think you'd approach this job as a new employee? Which issues would you tackle first, second and third? Please ask me anything you want to know as you think about your attack plan.
- What would it take salary-wise and otherwise to get you to take this job if we all decide it's a good fit? What would be the compensation package, benefits and other element (work hours, for instance, or the opportunity to work with certain tools or to have certain responsibilities) that would make you deliriously happy to accept this job?
