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The Most Useless Job Interview Question There Is And Why It Should Be Permanently Banished

This article is more than 9 years old.

Regardless of the field you’re in, it seems as if some clichéd job interview questions just refuse to die. If you haven’t been asked to discuss your greatest strength or weakness or what sets you apart from other candidates, you’re either self-employed or a poor listener. There’s one question, however, that is more useless than the rest. “Where do you see yourself in 5/10/20 years?” takes the cake for being both a banal and utterly unhelpful interjection in the average job interview.  Here’s why you’d be better off asking candidates their favorite color than prompting them to prognosticate:

It’s not illuminating

Ideally, every question a hiring manager poses in an interview should get them closer to understanding whether the person sitting across the table is the best fit for the role. Asking candidates where they see themselves in the future doesn’t help to do that because it’s not self-revelatory in the slightest. It’s the “Do I look fat in this?” of interview questions. Most likely, the interviewee gives the answer they think the hiring manager wants to hear (“I see myself growing in this role and continuing to further my career with the company, blah, blah, blah..."). All this tells you is that they’ve read enough interview prep articles to know what sort of response to offer. Here’s a hint: If nine out of ten experts agree on what the correct answer is to the interview question you’re asking, stop asking it . At that point, you're not info gathering, you're telling a tired knock-knock joke.

English: A desk in an office. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It demands a micro answer to a macro question

When people think about their future, career is only one part of the picture and far from the biggest one for many of us. While moving up the corporate ladder and accumulating skills and expertise are nice boons to the passage of time and a strong work ethic, they exist in relation (and often take a backseat) to other future-focused (and more tangible) goals such as marriage, starting a family, getting out of student debt or buying a home. The “Where do you see yourself?” question ignores the fact that our work is embedded in the context of our larger life — finances, relationships, self improvement, health —  and asks respondents to answer as if their vision of the future is predicated entirely on where their working life takes them. Don’t believe me? Try answering, “Married, with at least one child, another $50 000 in retirement savings and having completed an Ironman” the next time you’re asked and see what kind of look the hiring manager gives you.

The future is unpredictable (literally)

 10 years ago, ‘social media manager’ wasn’t a job anyone had heard of. Maybe 10 years from now, ‘HR director’ won’t exist and ‘Chief Hacking Officer’ will . With the speed of technological change, the pressure for organizations to be lean and adaptable, the reality of job hopping and the profound instability of geopolitics, it’s a safe bet where you’ll be in 10 years won’t follow a linear trajectory from where you are today.  Asking someone to speculate as to how they’d like their career to be at some arbitrary point in a future that’s in flux only serves to tell you which candidates lack imagination and understanding that change is the only constant.

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