Questions


Another day, another hour spent asleep on the floor of the bedroom of one of my daughters. This time at least I was tired both from jet lag and from going for a 90 minute run this morning. 

Today I interviewed three different people for a job. I ask the same battery of questions to all the candidates but it’s always surprising how wide a range of answers I get. Sometimes people give brutally simplistic solutions to problems. Sometimes they raise deep philosophical objections to the questions themselves. And sometimes they just ask me to repeat the question lots of times. 

I do sometimes worry that the questions I ask will find their way to Glassdoor.com for other applicants to pore over. A truly paranoid person would create questions that were the interviewing equivalent of the cartographer’s fallacy, though all that would really tell you was which candidates were cribbing notes from Glassdoor. Does that count as cheating? As careful preparation? Should I stop asking people “what’s the biggest thing you’ve ever eaten?” or “do you want to fight?” (But in my line of work, it’s essential to be able to recite from The Bad Tempered Ladybird so I don’t see a way out of this quandary.)

In a previous role, I put all my interviewing questions on my blog. Which nobody read. There’s something about security through obscurity that has at least aesthetic appeal. 


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