Job Interview Questions that are Worth Asking

I like questions that have a little bit of logic, a little bit of numeracy, and a little bit of watching someone think.

So, here's one question I read a long time ago that I loved.

Let’s say one day you’re riding to work on the subway or the bus. And you see someone sitting near you say, middle-aged woman. And she’s reading, she’s got her nose buried in this book, and her hair is drawn back and these thick glasses.

Right next to her, she’s got a big tote bag filled with more books, what’s likely that she is a librarian or a salesperson?

This is like a Daniel Kahneman type of question. So I’m supposed to answer with base rates. So I have to think that there are more salespeople than there are librarians. And therefore, that person is more likely a salesperson, even though there’s this salient cue, like many books- must be a librarian. And so I’m gonna go with the salesperson. I would be much more likely to want to hire you now, just because you know what base rate means for one. And for those who don’t know who Daniel Kahneman is and what he’s done, Daniel Kahneman is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Even though he’s a world-class psychologist, he’s one of a handful of economics Prize winners who is not an economist.

Too many people ask that question. It’s a leading question. You’re trying to not have it be a librarian. But then what you want someone to do is talk it through and get to the logic. So the logic is pretty simple. And then you want to hear how numerous people are? Yeah. So the fact is, or something like 150,000 librarians in America, and 18 million salespeople. So the odds are that any given person who happens to be reading books and they look a little bit studious, even if they’re female is a salesperson are about 80%.

If you said all that, the interviewer would be like, wow, this person isn’t just smart and has encyclopedic knowledge, but they know their numbers.

I think physicists ask really good questions. So do economists. So do psychologists. But I will state this, whenever you look at the list of questions that actual HR people ask actual would-be employees, I’ll be honest with you, I cringe a little bit. So here are the top five most common interview questions. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Why are you interested in working for our firm? Where do you see yourself in five years? 10 years? And why do you want to leave your current company?

So I think the strengths and weaknesses are not going to draw much good material. Where are you going to be in five or 10 years? Of the five, I like that the best.

I’ve heard good answers to that. I do ask some version of that to people. I think most interviewers are not looking for the ‘right answer’. They are looking for a revealing answer. They are looking for something that tells them in a relatively short time about character, depth, curiosity. On the other hand, I know Danny Kahneman has argued that when you’re interviewing you want a structured interview almost like a survey.

I think it’s not only Danny Kahneman but there’s a consensus in social science that what’s typically done is the unstructured interview, which is like a person walks in, you strike up a conversation, Oh, I noticed you’ve got a Phillies head-on, are you from Philadelphia? and then the conversations lead to a random walk through topics, and then all of a sudden an hour has gone by and the interviews over. That’s what most interviews probably are like in America. And not only does the consensus in social sites not add much predictive value to hiring the right person but in many cases could detract value. In other words, if you hadn’t interviewed the person at all, you would have been better off as an employer because you’re building up an image, a projection based on kind of garbage.

Well, I think the idea is this, you can come out of an hour-long interaction with another human being with a really strong visceral and emotional liking or disliking for that person. And then you could overweight it, you could ignore things like the resume is not so strong, and other recommendations that were iffy but God! we had this great conversation about the Phillies.

So like you, I’m pretty skeptical that interviews are going to add a lot of value to the decision process. And like Danny Kahneman and many others, I worry that they could provide negative value which is of course not an interview question, per se, it’s something else. It’s called a work sample. And I think there’s a mountain of research showing that, unlike unstructured interviews, work samples, which are just like, hey, you’re gonna have to do X, could you do a little of x? Now, let me see how it goes. Those are good and I recognize that the world being as diverse as it is, every job is different. Every industry is different. You can’t always get that.

So if I was interviewing, the one question I would be most excited to be asked, and this is meta, so I hope it doesn’t explode your brain. But if I were interviewing someone, I would ask them this question. Tell me the question that I should ask you, that’s gonna make me hire you. And I got this idea from someone who I did hire and is fantastic.

It’s really interesting to watch how they come up with questions and how they answer them.

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