I recently had a chance to meet with a career advisor from George Brown College Career Services – James Vandervoort – who comes into my Career Planning and Development class each term to talk about all of the wonderful services they provide.
He showed me an article he had pinned to his bulletin board (from Forbes, 4/27/2011) http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2011/04/27/top-executive-recruiters-agree-there-are-only-three-key-job-interview-questions/ which said that top executive recruiters agreed that there were only three true job interview questions.
Know what they are? Can you guess? Well, accordingly to this blurb, they are:
1. Can you do the job?
2. Will you love the job?
3. Can we tolerate working with you?
It asked us to think back to every question we’ve ever posed to others or had asked in a job interview and how they were a subset of a deeper in-depth follow up to one of these key questions. No matter how they are phrased, they are merely a variation of STRENGTHS, MOTIVATION and FIT.
I guess I might have to agree although I would never ask the three in this manner (but wouldn’t that be fun?). We really do want to know if the person can do the job and often ask numerous questions about what they’d done in the past (as key indicators of what they will do in the future), what motivates them (although many, many inferior recruiters don’t seem to care about a person’s motivation) and the candidates ‘fit to the team’ (certainly all the rage these days).
Too bad I’m just closing up several roles. But, the next role I recruit for, I’m going to ask it straight out “can we tolerate working with you?” It’ll be interesting to hear the responses.
What do you think?
Hi Alice, sometimes we tend to complicate questions, well all we really need is to get to the heart of the matter. These three simple questions, can generate discussion and most likely honest responses.
Indeed…KISS (Keep it simple silly) is the best advice!