06 Mar 10 Stupid Interview Questions And How To Answer Them
By: Susan Adams, Forbes
Ellis Chase has been in the career and staffing business for 36 years, first in the human resources department at what was then Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, then as a managing director at staffing firm Right Management and now as an independent career and executive coach. He does workshops for Columbia Business School’s MBA career office and he’s published a book that conveys his accumulated wisdom, In Search of the Fun-Forever Job: Career Strategies That Work.
Over the years he’s conducted numerous job interviews and he’s coached hundreds of clients on how to prepare and succeed in interviews, and debriefed them after the fact. Along the way he’s formed some strong opinions about questions he deems stupid. “Any negative questions are trap questions,” he insists. “If you answer them in a straightforward way you can dig a deep hole for yourself.” Beyond negative questions, he’s also compiled a list of queries that he calls “flat out dumb, stupid questions, or what I call ‘college entrance questions.’” The problem is that interviewers ask them of 42-year-old midcareer professionals.
For the negative questions, like “where have you had trouble at work,” he recommends telling a story about a challenge you’ve had in the past and how you overcame it. For silly questions, he says chuckling and then saying you don’t have an immediate answer, is often the best way to go.
I asked Chase to lay out a list of stupid questions and to share his wisdom about how job candidates can best answer them. Here are 10 questions that interviewers have asked and the answers he recommends. Three of them are negative questions and the rest are questions he calls just plain stupid.
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