2
The Interview Questions You Shouldn’t Be Asking

Now that you’ve discovered your Brown Shorts, you’re almost ready to turn those insights into powerful Brown Shorts Interview Questions. But before you do, you want to make sure you have enough time during the interview to ask those great questions. The most effective way to use your time more efficiently is to eliminate the bad questions you (and a lot of others) are currently asking.

Many interview questions are utterly useless, and some are actually dangerous (legally speaking). And many commonly asked questions have a built-in flaw whereby they elicit rehearsed replies. As a result, they deliver skewed data that can negatively impact your hiring decisions.

This chapter introduces four types of bad interview questions. There are a lot more than that, but I selected these four categories because they represent the kinds of poorly formed interview questions that Leadership IQ surveys and studies have found to be the most commonly used across a broad spectrum of industries. If you (or your organization) currently use any of these types of questions, it’s important to understand why they are so bad and to stop using them immediately. Remember that this is not a comprehensive list of bad interview questions. Even if you don’t recognize any of these questions as the type you ask, it’s still critical to analyze those questions you do use and ask yourself “Is this question helping or hurting my quest to Hire for Attitude?” If you find you have questions that do nothing to help you Hire for Attitude, get rid of them to make room for your Brown Shorts Interview Questions.

DON’T ASK THESE QUESTIONS NUMBER 1: THE THREE MOST COMMON QUESTIONS

Leadership IQ’s numerous studies and interviews with hiring managers have revealed that the following three questions are the ones most interviewers use. Frighteningly, these bad questions are the ones a lot of interviewers rely upon when making their final hiring decisions.

• Tell me about yourself.

• What are your strengths?

• What are your weaknesses?

These are bad questions for a variety of reasons. First, these questions are too vague; they allow for only vacuous answers. Second, because these questions are so well known, and because it’s remarkably easy to conceive of and verbalize any number of empty answers, virtually every candidate has ready a canned answer. And third, because all those rehearsed vacuous answers sound the same, it’s nearly impossible to differentiate between future high and low performers based on any of the answers.

Some people try to justify their use of these questions by arguing that the vagueness of the questions and the vacuous nature of the answers they inspire make them a rapport-building exercise to be used at the beginning of the interview. But rapport-building is all about getting people relaxed and making them feel comfortable enough to open up to you, not making them recite a vapid answer to a question that is trying to judge them.

Clearly, you want to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of people you interview, but asking these three questions will only reveal how well your candidate can recite scripted answers. The purpose of an interview isn’t to test recitation skills, but rather to accurately reveal how a person will perform when working for you. To further prove that the questions “tell me about yourself,” “what are your strengths?” and “what are your weaknesses?” are worthless, think about the answers you usually get when you ask an applicant a question such as “So tell me about yourself …”

The typical response goes something like this: “Well, I’m a motivated self-starter—always have been. Ever since I was a kid I’ve really loved hard work. Those were the values I grew up with: working hard, but not in a way that burns out the people around me; persevering, but still knowing when enough is enough; and collaborating but also helping other people get better. I’ve also been told that I have a lot of humility and a real appreciation for the feelings of others. I guess some people would call that emotional intelligence. In conclusion, I’m really dedicated to bringing value to others, especially my boss. I’ve never desired a work-life balance for myself (due to some “gifted child” experiments when I was a kid, I don’t need sleep). But I am 100 percent dedicated to being good in my job so that my boss can achieve an amazing work-life balance.”

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all this were true? Honestly, though, what can you really learn from this response? The only thing I learned is that this potential employee is a good script writer who has a talent for reciting lines. And if line recitation happens to be a critical characteristic for the job, then perhaps you should consider this candidate. Beyond that, there’s not much else to be learned from this response or any responses like it.

Now imagine that after you shake off your amazement at your candidate’s brilliant example of critical self-reflection (please note the sarcasm), you ask a follow-up question. “Wow, that all sounds really great. I don’t suppose you have any weaknesses, do you?”

Given the candidate’s initial response, it shouldn’t be difficult to predict the kind of answer this follow up will elicit: “I was really hoping you wouldn’t ask me that because I never lie, and I actually do have two weaknesses. First, I have been told by my previous bosses that I work too hard. I get way too involved with my work and I end up giving too much of myself to the job. This also feeds my perfectionist streak; I really like to make sure that my boss never ever sees a mistake come from me. And this leads to my second weakness, which is that sometimes I care too much about my teammates. Here again, I’m guilty of giving way too much of myself in my efforts to help them achieve greatness.”

Now, if reports started rolling in that interviewers were asking “What are your weaknesses?” and hearing responses such as “I have a violent temper and I stalked my last boss,” or “I hate people, and I can’t stand taking orders,” then perhaps this line of questioning would be valuable. But honest responses such as these are rarely heard in an interview, and the odds are small that anyone will answer any of these three questions with complete honesty.

One of the most fundamental tests of the effectiveness of an interview question is the extent to which it helps differentiate between high and low performers. Any interview question that doesn’t distinguish between these two groups is the equivalent of giving a college exam on which every student automatically scores an A. What’s the point of giving a test where everyone gets the same grade? Beware of both any response that comes off sounding puffed-up and hollow and any question that produces hollow answers.

DON’T ASK THESE QUESTIONS NUMBER 2: THE BEHAVIORAL QUESTIONS

You’re probably familiar with the concept of a behavioral interview question. It’s essentially a question based on the philosophy that how a person responded to a past situation accurately predicts how that person will respond when that situation occurs again. These questions typically begin with the phrase “Tell me about a time …”

The following are some standard behavioral interview questions commonly asked by managers around the globe, and every one of them is seriously flawed. See if you can identify the problem.

• Tell me about a time when you had to adapt to a difficult situation. What did you do?

• Tell me about a time when you had to balance competing priorities and did so successfully.

• Tell me about a conflict with a coworker and how you resolved it.

There is nothing inherently wrong with hiring questions that target previous behaviors. Past behavior can be a great predictor of future behavior. But there’s a caveat. Behavioral questions are only effective when they prompt a response that reveals the truth about both weaknesses and strengths. And that’s where these three questions go horribly wrong. Every one of them contains an obvious tip-off on how to game a response that showcases the good and hides the bad. They are all leading questions—they lead the candidate to give the desired answer.

Imagine you have a highly collaborative culture that includes lots of teamwork and shared decision making, and you want to assess which job candidates are a good fit. So, in your next interview, you ask a question such as “Listen, our corporate culture is highly collaborative and really based around teamwork. So tell me about your teamwork skills.”

That question is about as leading as a question gets. The candidate would have to be completely clueless not to deliver a solid answer. You just revealed that you value teamwork and then asked him to concur with your stated love of teamwork by providing some easy-to-generate examples.

It’s fairly easy to see the flaws in this teamwork question—how it leads the candidate to figure out the correct answer. But the three examples of behavioral questions that I began this section with, while more subtle, are just as problematic.

Despite the variety of personalities and attitudes out there, you can still roughly categorize people into two groups: the problem bringers and problem solvers. When you ask a problem bringer about a problem, you’ll hear about the problem and nothing more. We’ve all worked with these folks, and you know that they can spend all day telling you about a problem without ever coming close to offering a solution. By contrast, when you ask a problem solver about a problem, you’ll hear about the problem, but you’ll also hear some potential solutions. That’s because problem solvers can’t even think of a problem without instantly generating possible solutions. For them, separating problems and solutions is as ludicrous as separating wet from water. And no matter what particular attitude you’re looking to hire, you’ll want that person to have a problem solver predisposition.

Leading questions rob you of your chance to find out if someone is a problem bringer or a problem solver. Let’s say you ask a candidate a typical behavioral question, something like “Tell me about a time when you had to adapt to a difficult situation.” It may sound like a good question, but the word adapt turns it into a leading question, sending a clear signal that you want to hear only about a time the candidate adapted (instead of the many times that person failed to adapt). Now, in the case of true high performer candidates (the problem solvers), this isn’t such a big deal. These folks have plenty of examples that describe a time they successfully adapted to a difficult situation. And even if you lose the leading part of that question, a high performer is going to tell you not only about the difficult situation, but also about the steps taken to adapt to that difficult situation. As I’ve said, it’s practically impossible for high performers to imagine facing a difficult situation without also successfully adapting to it.

But for problem bringers (low performers), using the word adapted renders this question useless. The problem bringers have probably faced countless difficult situations, but it’s unlikely that they successfully adapted to any of them. In fact, the times problem bringers successfully adapted probably constitute such a tiny fraction of the times they faced difficult situations that it would never even occur to them to search their mental databases and find the one instance where it happened. When you introduce a leading question, you’re not giving the problem bringers the chance to disclose that information. However, cut out the leading part and ask only about facing a difficult situation and all those problem bringer personalities are going to tell you the truth. They’ll tell you about a time they faced a difficult situation, but they aren’t going to offer up any information about how they solved the problem. You asked about a problem, and that’s what you’re going to hear about (and just think how much fun that personality type would be to work with).

Now consider the question “Tell me about a conflict with a coworker and how you resolved it.” I bet you picked right up on the leading part that asks about a resolution. At this point you should recognize the signal it sends: forget about all the times you did not resolve the conflict with a coworker and just tell me about a time you did. But from a hiring perspective, that information you just told the candidate to dismiss is what’s important to know. What if the candidate resolved the conflict once and failed to resolve it 500 times? By making this a leading question, you’ve lost all the data on the 500 episodes when there was no resolve.

Or how about the question “Tell me about a time when you had to balance competing priorities and did so successfully.” “Balance competing priorities” aided by “successfully” clues the candidate to not tell you about all the times he struggled or failed to balance competing priorities (good information to have). Instead, he is going to search his memory to find the one time he was able to balance priorities successfully and use that as his example.

Interview questions, and especially the behavioral ones, go wrong when they become leading questions. When we explicitly or implicitly signal to our candidates what answer we’re looking for, it stops them from revealing their true sentiments. There are many interview questions where that kind of signaling is obvious. In fact, when Leadership IQ is called in to evaluate an organization’s interview questions, we usually find that at least two-thirds of the behavioral questions being asked are leading.

Of course, the big questions are Will people be honest when you strip out the leading parts of a question? Will they actually reveal the truth about whether they are problem solvers or problem bringers? Leadership IQ’s data say yes. In a recent project we redesigned a client’s leading interview questions. One of the revamped questions asked “Tell me about a time you lacked the skills or knowledge to complete an assignment.” (They removed the leading “and tell me what you did.”) Here are snippets of some actual answers:

• “Happened all the time; that’s why I’m interviewing with you guys.”

• “I told them to find somebody else.”

• “That’s why we have customer service; let them figure it out.”

• “When I don’t know what to do, I’d rather do nothing at all.”

• “I just ignored their request.”

Those were the problem bringers. Here are a few examples of answers the revamped, nonleading question elicited from the problem solvers:

• “I wasn’t afraid to admit that I lacked the skills I needed and was easily able to find a peer who caught me up to speed.”

• “I enlisted the help of someone from corporate who was familiar with the tool I did not know how to use. I didn’t have to solve the problem from scratch, and it sure felt good to share the credit for a job well done.”

• “I made certain to stay in close communication with the customer. They were aware that I didn’t have a ready solution, but I made sure they knew that I was doing all I could to get them the information they needed. As a result, we not only held on to one of our best customers, we also gained their appreciation regarding the extent to which our organization will go to deliver great customer service.”

Obviously, the problem-bringer answers are terrible and the problem-solver answers are great. But these are all honest answers, and because they are honest, any interviewer could easily use the information to make an accurate assessment about attitude. This, then, is the whole point of an interview question—to reveal the candidate’s true attitude, not his or her canned, rehearsed interview personality.

DON’T ASK THESE QUESTIONS NUMBER 3: THE HYPOTHETICAL QUESTIONS

Most hypothetical questions begin by asking “What would you do if …” followed by some kind of situation such as “you had to make a big decision?” Hypothetical questions are problematic because the answers they inspire are usually idealized. You’ll probably get a lot of responses that sound like something a high performer would do, but those answers will rarely reflect reality. Despite what we each might like to believe about ourselves, there’s a huge gap between our hypothetical selves and our real selves.

For instance, let’s say I selected some random people off the street and asked “What would you do if you saw a complete stranger being assaulted in a public place?” I can guarantee that virtually every person I asked would give one of two possible answers: “I’d rush right in to help” or “I’d immediately call 911.” Isn’t that how you would respond?

Both responses sound great, like true high performers. These responses, though, are nothing more than conjecture, a notion or supposition of what those people think they would do in that situation. However, put those same folks in the real-life position of witnessing a public assault, and there’s no telling what they might do. Some of them might actually freeze with fear. Or maybe, in an effort to protect their lives, others would run away from the scene and then call the police. The bottom line is that it’s dangerous to try and predict what people will do in reality by asking them about a hypothetical situation.

There was a news story a while back about a Kansas woman who was stabbed during the robbery of a convenience store. The entire incident was caught on the store’s surveillance cameras. The stabbing was brutal, but that’s not why the story made national headlines. Footage from the camera showed five patrons stepping over the woman’s prone and bleeding body to exit; not one of them stopped or did anything to help. One of them even paused to take a picture of her with a cell phone. It was only after all the witnesses had left the store that someone called the police. The woman later died at the hospital.

There were numerous online comments made in response to this event, and a lot of them included statements of public outrage—things like “I’d never have walked away.” And yet, all five people in that store that day showed no hesitation in stepping over a dying woman to exit a bad situation. Maybe if at least one of them had stayed behind to help or to call 911, I’d have more faith in hypothetical responses. But they didn’t, and so I don’t, and neither should you.

Another problem with most hypothetical questions is that it’s not difficult to discern what the interviewer wants in response, and thus it’s easy to come up with the correct answer. For example, take the popular hypothetical interview question “How would you deal with personality clashes among team members?” There are lots of different ways to answer this question, all of which sound intelligent. And they are all responses that would likely be successful—if they were implemented the way they were stated.

For instance, if I were asked the personality clash question, I’d probably shape my answer something like this: “I’ve found that there can be four different root causes of personality clashes among team members, and each one requires a different response. First, there can be clashes when the team doesn’t have a clearly articulated goal that collectively binds and bonds the group. So, this kind of situation requires some work to align the group with a collective strategy. Second, there might be a long and troubled history between two or more members. In this case, I’d take a different approach,” and so on.

My answer is sufficient to get me through most interviews, but it doesn’t say anything about what I’d do in real life, let alone provide any clues about my attitude. There’s a big difference between knowing the path and walking the path. (Do we really think smokers are somehow oblivious to the health effects of smoking? When I was younger, I knew darn well about the possible consequences, but that didn’t stop me from putting Mr. Marlboro in my mouth.) The answer I gave reflects the fact that I know how to manage team conflict. But just because I know what to do doesn’t preclude me from having a bad attitude, such as yelling at my team to get its act together because I can’t control my temper. Or simply ignoring the problem and letting it fester and destroy the team because I’m too scared to deal with it, or whatever.

Over the years, I’ve met few leaders who didn’t understand the idea that a toxic personality can destroy a work group. It’s an intuitive and easily understood concept. And yet I’ve met thousands of managers who were afraid to sit down and have some straight talk with those same toxic personalities. The theory is simple and the hypotheticals are easy, but actually handling the situation can be terrifying. And that’s the problem with hypotheticals—they’re testing whether applicants understand the theory. They fail completely, though, when it comes to assessing whether candidates will actually implement that theory in the real world.

Leadership IQ conducted a study a few years ago called “Why CEOs Get Fired.” My team and I went beyond the typical press release vagaries such as “Bob has decided to step down for personal reasons and we appreciate his years of service” and investigated the true reasons why CEOs get ousted. The study revealed that one of the top reasons CEOs get the boot is a lack of execution—too much talk and not enough action. They know what needs to be done; they just can’t bring themselves to actually do it. Most executives are really smart, but that brainpower doesn’t mean they always take the right actions (like avoiding petty power plays, or not becoming emotionally blind to failing pet projects or low performing executives).

So the next time you feel tempted to ask a job candidate “What would you do if two angry customers demanded your attention at the same time?” or “If selected for this position, how quickly could you make a significant contribution?” save yourself the time and trouble. Whatever answer you get is going to be a poor predictor of what that person would do in real life.

DON’T ASK THESE QUESTIONS NUMBER 4: THE UNDIFFERENTIATING QUESTIONS

As we’ve already established, an interview question is worth asking only if it differentiates between high and low performers. And, as I said earlier, if a question is designed so it allows every candidate to give roughly the same answer, it’s analogous to giving a test on which everyone automatically gets the same grade. There’s a corollary problem, though; essentially, it’s as though you were giving a test without an answer key. If you ask an interview question and you have no clue how to use the answer as an indicator of high or low performance, what’s the point of asking it? It’s an undifferentiating question.

Here’s an example. Imagine I ask everyone I interview to tell me their favorite flavor of pie. (Note that this question would probably never pass a review by your legal team, but it makes for a useful theoretical illustration.) Asking about pie is a ridiculous question, not just for the obvious and legal reasons, but also because I don’t have any validating data. That is, I have no idea what it means if someone says “blueberry” or “banana cream.” It could be a potentially valid question only if numerous scientific studies indicated that anyone whose favorite pie is strawberry-rhubarb is, say, an aspiring serial killer.

I say that only half-jokingly, because while the example is admittedly goofy, the research method is quite sound. For example, you may have heard of the “homicidal triad,” which is three behaviors (animal cruelty, obsession with setting fires, and bed-wetting past age five) often thought to predict that someone is prone to homicidal behavior. This triad, also called the Macdonald Triad, was noticed by psychiatrist John M. Macdonald who discovered that sadistic psychiatric patients often had those three behaviors in common.

In essence, Dr. Macdonald did exactly what I’m talking about here with the favorite pie question. He looked at a population of people (violence-prone psychiatric patients for him, employees for me) and isolated common behaviors (torturing animals or loving blueberry pie). The problem is, unlike Dr. Macdonald, I have no evidence that links high performance with any particular kind of pie.

Now let’s say I survey every employee in my organization and discover that all my high performers love cherry pie and hate apple pie. And then I discover that all my low performers love apple pie and hate cherry pie. Armed with this bit of insight, the question about pies might actually become useful (assuming my lawyers ever allowed me to ask it). But if I were able to ask it, then I could query candidates about their favorite pies, and if they said “cherry,” I’d hire them on the spot. And if they said “apple,” I’d end the interview immediately.

So what am I really saying here? Are questions like these good or bad? The answer is that these oddball questions are bad because there’s no scientific evidence to correlate specific interview answers with real-life work behaviors. Too often interviewers get too cute. They think that because they’re trying to figure out a person’s attitude, they should design a clever, pseudo-psychological question that will reveal the person’s personality. But they don’t typically have any science to back this up. They just happen to like a particular question and so they stick with it, even if all it elicits is useless or incorrect information.

The following are a few examples of some particularly troublesome undifferentiating questions. These interview questions are actually being used. Some were sourced from the folks who have been certified in Hiring for Attitude or who have attended a Leadership IQ hiring webinar or seminar. I found others on Glassdoor.com. (Glassdoor.com is a free career community where anyone can find and anonymously share an inside look at jobs and companies.)

• “What do you like to do for fun?” (According to Glassdoor.com, this was an interview question for an intern at Ernst & Young. A related question is “What do you like to do outside of work?”)

• “How are M&M’s made?” (According to Glassdoor.com, this was an interview question asked by US Bank.)

• “If you could be any superhero, who would it be?” (According to Glassdoor.com, this was an interview question asked by AT&T, but we’ve also been told this question—or the variation “Which superpower would you choose?”—has been asked by companies like Citigroup.)

• “What was the last book you read?” (We’ve heard hundreds of reports of companies using this question, including Humana and Fujitsu Network Communications. The “movie” variation is also popular.)

• “Which one of the seven dwarves would you be?” (Honestly, it just seems too cruel to name the companies that use this question.)

• “If you could be any kind of tree (or animal/fish/vegetable), what kind of tree would you be?” (We’ve also heard of hundreds of companies using these questions.)

So let’s suppose I ask my candidates the question “If you could be any kind of animal, what kind of animal would you be?” Once again, without any scientific studies to prove that every high performer in my company answers this question “lion,” and every low performer answers “gazelle,” I just don’t gain a lot of insight. And even worse, the insight I think I’m getting could be completely wrong. What if I think all high performers would answer “parrot” (because I’m a huge Jimmy Buffett fan) and all low performers would answer “lizard” (no offense intended to any Jim Morrison fans)? How many wrong people will I hire simply because they too like parrots? And, how many stars might get cast aside because they happen to like reptiles?

I actually had an executive from a well-known energy company tell me that his hiring managers regularly use the animal question. The top executives decided, without any scientific study, that future high performers would say “tiger” and future low performers would say “elephant.” And they stood by those answers—if you didn’t say tiger, it wasn’t likely that you were going to get hired. Just imagine how many potential high performers they passed over (and how many low performers they hired) because of an answer to an undifferentiating question.

And just for the record (not that it really matters as the question is null and void regardless), tigers may be cool (after all, Charlie Sheen has tiger blood in his veins), but elephants happen to be far smarter. In fact, the rundown of animal intelligence is often listed as humans, followed by apes, followed by elephants, followed by dolphins. And it’s not just because of the elephant’s famed ability to remember. Even Aristotle once said the elephant was “… the beast which passeth all others in wit and mind.” So I can only assume the interviewers at that energy company did no research at all when they came up with the right and wrong answers to their senseless question. Because if you were going to pull some nonsensical “right answer” out of thin air, wouldn’t you at least want the smarter, more loyal, longer-living, no-natural-predators animal?

Let me offer one more critical thought on these types of questions. Many of the pseudo-psychological questions such as “What’s the last book you read?” open the door to potential legal problems. For example, pretend you work at a publicly traded nonreligious, but fairly conservative, organization, and you ask the last book question. Now let’s say you have a technically qualified candidate who answers, “Gee, the last book I read was Practicing Your Faith as a Litigious Bisexual Wiccan Cancer Patient.” What do you do with that answer? In the worst-case scenario, you’ve potentially gleaned three bits of information—sexual preference, religion, and medical status—all of which are illegal to go after in an interview. And for what purpose did you put yourself in that kind of dangerous position? You didn’t learn anything useful about this candidate, did you? And if the revealing part of that book title reflects the candidate’s personality, you’ve got a potential legal problem should you decide not to hire this person.

Bad interview questions can be crazy, funny, and even illegal, but they all share a common link: they don’t do anything to help you assess attitude. For that you need Brown Shorts questions, so let’s get started learning how to create them.

For free downloadable resources including the latest research, discussion guides, and forms please visit www.leadershipiq.com/hiring.