Fighting HR silliness
Heh.
At one point, I interviewed with a company and hit it off with the CFO and CEO. Then, I met the operations guy who was running the local show. I’d have indirectly reported to him and we know how that goes. He spent our interview time asking me questions about shifting paradigms and leveraging resources and value added catalysts for change and what kind of tree I would be. You know, that line where hippie-speak meets MBA-speak. It’s right there in that place where white-guilters and environmentalists decided to go to business or law school instead of liberal arts so they can change the world and make some money. Back when consulting was big. It was an odd place. Anyway, after the fifth or so histrionic question, I asked the guy, very dead pan, if he was going to ask me or offer me something substantive. He looked perplexed. And I told him that I think I we’re done here.
A thing hiring people tend to forget is that not only are they interviewing you, you’re interviewing them.
Update: Oh and one of the questions went like this:
Interviewer: How do you handle conflict?
Me: That really depends.
Interviewer: On?
Me: Well, am I right or am I uncertain?
Interviewer: You’re right.
Me: Then I tell them to do it my way and that’s that.
Interviewer: *looks puzzled*
September 13th, 2012 at 7:30 pm
Was he wearing a douchebag vest, blue jeans and hipster shoes?
September 13th, 2012 at 7:58 pm
I hate those asinine HR questions. People in HR are totally useless, maybe they have one or two uses. They seem to think they can screen professional applicants when they don’t know the first thing about the industry or your profession. They ask BS questions which don’t have an answer, so they can use all answers against you if you’re not wearing the right color neck tie.
September 13th, 2012 at 8:14 pm
I had an interview recently were the first thing I was told was that I had to alter my signature. The lady tried to tell me that it wasn’t legible and therefor it wasn’t legal to use on state paperwork. I replied that that’s funny, it’s always been good enough for the federal paperwork I had been filling out for the last 15 years. She continued with that meme for a couple of minutes and I said “we are done here”. I walked out. About 10 minutes later I got a call telling me the job was mine if I still wanted it. Her supervisor overruled the lady I’d been talking to without me ever having said a word to her.
September 13th, 2012 at 8:15 pm
*where… sigh… long day
September 13th, 2012 at 8:47 pm
Dave: HR people are not useless.
HR’s main job is to prevent upper management from pissing off employees to the point they unionize, and to identify losers and flake before hiring without violating federal laws designed to prevent them from identifying losers or flakes.
This is where the psych battery questions come out of the wood work, and why you keep a separate email for dealing with work issues.
The problem is when some hippie moron gets into this position, and uses it to weed out people who are not hippie morons.
September 14th, 2012 at 12:33 am
Shit, I’ve been to interviews where I’ve asked for the copy of my resume back.
September 14th, 2012 at 8:20 am
I’ve interviewed people with big resumes and no meat. Usually I avoid them (I can read through a resume and see BS 99 out of 100 times), but occasionally you are demented, desperate or bored enough to read the fancy ones. Every so often you are doing someone a favor.
I tend to ask the industry-specific version of “Tell me the Pythagorean Theorem”*. Then I start working my way down to “2+2=?”. Amazingly, the fanciest resumes cannot get there. People with 20 years experience, completely unable to answer basic technical questions.
Sometimes I interview 10 people and hire none, even though I really, really need someone. These last five years, I’d rather go without than have good people clean up their eventual mess.
* I don’t actually ask this question. It is a metaphore for the questions I do ask, which are basically low-level tech stuff.
September 14th, 2012 at 8:42 am
Uggh. I hate interviews like that. Fortunately in my field the interviews tend to be technical.
I have to do a lot of hiring these days, and I do keep in mind that interviews are two-way.
September 14th, 2012 at 10:02 am
See The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing.
Much better to *not* hire the “right” guy than it is to *hire* the wrong guy. Same goes for taking the job.
September 14th, 2012 at 10:04 am
Let me try that again: The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing.
Good thing I don’t need HTML skills for *my* job.
September 14th, 2012 at 10:12 am
I have interviewed prospective hires and found out way more about their personal lives than I ever asked for, or cared to know. When a question about their previous experience leads to the tale of their divorce, there is a problem with the applicant.
I also have been interviewed by people who had no idea about the legalities of interviewing, who directly asked me my marriage status, number and age of kids, religious affiliation and so on. When I answered that my job qualifications where what I was there to discuss, because my PERSONAL life would never intrude on my work, and the light bulb came on in their heads, it was interesting to see.
September 14th, 2012 at 11:52 am
@Patrick,
Well, if they don’t start with “The Pythagorean Theorem…that’s about triangles, right?”, then they slept through a lot of high school math.
But that depends on whether you want people who have some shadow of that knowledge in the back of their minds…
September 14th, 2012 at 5:04 pm
I always ask one screwball question to judge the persons reaction on their feet. It’ll come out of nowhere. If they gave me a response like you did, I’d smile and say “where all right.”
Usually they hem and haw and give some nonesense passive response. I look for the folks who have enough self respect and assurance to tell me its an idiotic question or that they simply don’t know the answer.
September 15th, 2012 at 7:46 am
At my current gig, I was referred by a friend. He prepped me early with all of the BS hippie questions so I had some asinine responses ready. As I am an electrical engineer, I asked him how hard the technical interview would be. He replied that HR had decided that asking technical questions could be considered discriminatory, so there was no technical interview. This was for a job with great benefits, $83K / year, and free graduate school. But I did know what to say when they asked, “How do you think you could help us create the future?”
September 15th, 2012 at 10:49 am
…yeah.
Having been laid off a while back, and being currently located in the rusted-out, bombed-out ruin that is Michigan, I recently interviewed for a telephone tech support position in a building full of mumbling, strutting IQ-55 ghetto goobers.
Thick-ankled HR Lady’s first question: “If you were part of a salad, what vegetable would you be?”
I just about bit off my own tongue. My first impulse was to ask whether perhaps an adult was available. Look, I can read and write and speak grammatically correct English, unlike 85% of your current workforce, and I took it upon myself to drive all the way to your dilapidated building in the crumbling business park on the edge of the ghetto. Why are you yanking my chain and wasting my time?
September 18th, 2012 at 10:00 pm
There’s a fantastic ongoing series of IT interview horror stories over at The Daily WTF that I try to catch up with every year or so.
http://thedailywtf.com/Series/Tales_from_the_Interview.aspx