Favorite Interview Questions
Some of the items on this list are pretty bad IMO if you put yourself in the shoes of the candidate. Some of the ones I think are Not Good Questions:<p>> 3. For the last few companies you've been at, take me through: (i) When you left, why did you leave? (ii) When you joined the next one, why did you choose it?<p>(The (ii) is the only non-yikes part)<p>> 18. What's one part of your previous company's culture that you hope to bring to your next one? What one part do you hope to not find?<p>> 26. If I were to go and speak to people who don't think very highly of you, what would they say?<p>What they share in common is they're inviting the candidate into a negative position, where they must think negative thoughts about their past employers (who may also be their _current_ employer). Then, on the spot and extemporaneously, the candidate has to negotiate those negative feelings that were prompted by the interviewer to come up with an answer that translates those negative feelings into some kind of positive learning experience that the manager will be able to understand. The candidate also has to deal with the stress from having to do that negotiation, then diffuse that stress provoked by the question in a positive, open way so that it doesn't impact the rest of the interview.<p>edit: What's really wild about #26 is the person who explained why they like the question made it about empathy.<p>> "When I pose this question to candidates, I’m always looking to see how much empathy they have for the people who don’t like them,” says Otte...<p>How is a candidate supposed to tap into their empathy when this question seems deliberately engineered to put candidates on the defensive? "Why don't people like you?" is, in my opinion, a really terrible interview question that shows a lack of empathy from the interviewer.