Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Life and Interview Questions

I once saw a job application that asked the applicant to list magazines that he or she reads on a regular basis. Later, I learned that the company's CEO held strong opinions regarding pornography so if you listed anything wilder than Reader's Digest or Field and Stream then your odds of making it to the interview were slight.

Although it is easy to mock the use of magazine tastes as a job standard, there's something admirable about a question that goes beyond the "Just the facts" Dragnet style. You can find employment interviews that are so stilted and lawyer-bound that although the company may be assured that it has selected a qualified candidate, it may be less confident that it has chosen a human being. Couple that with the applicants who've gone through Machiavellian interview workshops and it is understandably refreshing when something spontaneous actually slips out before an oral board.

I've advised job seekers to ignore the standard notion that hobbies and outside interests should be omitted. Adding those can humanize the contender. There are obvious exceptions - an interest in ballet might not land that off-shore oil drilling job - but set those aside and you have quite a bit of running room.

This may just be a quirk on my part. I can already hear the heart palpitations of HR professionals who shudder at the thought of letting first-line supervisors stray from the hygenically approved questions and yet there is a cautious, quasi-Victorian, aspect to the current process that begs for reform. As the Spanish anarchist saying went, "If they give you lined paper, write against the lines."

Not always, of course, but just enough to show you're breathing.

2 comments:

Rowan Manahan said...

I couldn't agree with you more Michael! The convention of omitting ALL personal and extra curricular details renders already generic candidates even more generic. (One Partner in a legal firm I was working with sputtered "They're like link sausages coming out of a factory - how am I supposed to distinguish one from another" when we were hiring at graduate level.)

I advise my clients to list current interests under the categories of Physical, Cerebral, Social and Altruistic. Then we can decide what to include and what to omit on an application by application basis. Many recruiters I know in the British Isles (and to a lesser extent in Canada) turn to the Extra Curricular section of the application FIRST.

Michael Wade said...

I'm glad to hear that you agree, Rowan. I can understand why many recruiters turn to the Extra Curricular section first. That's where you get a better sense of the person. The rest pertains to sausage links.