Interviewing Fly-On-The-Wall
by Miki SaxonThis is a short post, because you need time to read the links.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a CEO building an executive team or a newly promoted supervisor, interviewing is critical to success — the team’s, the company’s and, especially, yours.
The most important things to learn from your interviewing aren’t about hard or soft skills.
The truly critical factors are
- how they think; and
- their attitude.
That should be the “make or break” information you come away with.
There’s a lot of help to be found here; look in the hiring category and use the various interview* tags — and, of course, today’s links.
Asking slightly off-the-wall questions that candidates can’t prepare for is a good technique as long as you have a valid goal in mind — one that is well beyond just being discomforting.
The technique is used by CEOs from companies diverse companies, including Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Stormy Simon, president of Overstock and Ashley Morris, CEO of Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop.
Use them as a guide, because the same questions probably won’t work for you. First, they will become well-known as they are passed around the digital world, and second, because they won’t be relevant to your particular situation.
Now, a moment of interviewing levity, better know as “candidates say/do the strangest things” or WTF?????
“It’s hard to say why a candidate would do some of these things,” Rosemary Haefner, chief human-resources officer for CareerBuilder, tells Business Insider. “Maybe he or she is nervous, thinks an employer would find it funny, or perhaps the candidate simply has no boundaries.”
More than 2,600 hiring managers and employers shared with CareerBuilder the most memorable job-interview mistakes candidates have made. Here are 25 of the most unusual things that happened:
I sent this link to several friends; here is the response of one who is a senior manager at a large industrial enterprise in the southeast.
I’ve been offered a blow job, been asked out, been introduced to the “cruising” area of my city, threatened with a sexual harassment suit and shouted at. Interviewing is no joke…
Managers are still sticking their respective feet in their respective mouths.
Image credit: Hiking Artist