Difficult interview questions

What happens next?

1. In a romantic comedy, a man and a woman meet in the first ten minutes, misunderstand each other and decide they can't stand one another. How does the film end?

2. You're in a supermarket. There are two queues. You join one; the other starts moving faster. You switch. Then what?

3. A character in a horror film hears a noise in the basement and says, "I'll go and check — you wait here."

4. Someone announces on social media that they're "taking a break from social media for a while."

5. You've been waiting twenty minutes for a bus. You give up and start walking.

6. A friend says, "I don't want to tell you how to live your life, but…"

7. Someone in a meeting says, "This will only take a minute."

8. It's the last five minutes of a football match. The team that's winning 1–0 decides to defend and wait for the whistle.

Interviews are at least as predictable as rom-coms. As a group, let's come up with the ten questions you think come up most often in job interviews.

our list

the real list

1. Tell me about yourself.

2. Why do you want to work here?

3. What are your strengths?

4. What's your greatest weakness?

5. Why are you leaving your current job?

6. Where do you see yourself in five years?

7. Tell me about a challenge or conflict you've faced at work and how you dealt with it.

8. Why should we hire you?

9. What are your salary expectations?

10. Do you have any questions for us?

discuss

How many did you get?

Which of these have you actually been asked?

Which would you find easiest to answer right now, with no preparation? Which would make you stall?

Which of the questions are notoriously difficult to answer?

Number 9: is it fair to ask this in a first interview? Should the candidate answer it?

Number 10: what have you asked in the past? What did it get you?

If every candidate knows these questions are coming, what is the interviewer actually testing?

"Why do you want to work here?"

Why it's difficult. Because the honest answer ("I need an income and this job looks acceptable") is true for almost everyone and is treated as disqualifying if you say it. The question creates a gap between what you think and what you're allowed to say, and most people fill the gap with something they've read on the company's website. The interviewer has heard the website version two hundred times.

How to answer it. Separate the two things the question is actually asking: why this job, and why this company. For the job, name one or two things about the role itself that match what you're good at or want to do more of - not "a challenging environment", but "the role is half customer contact, half process work, and I'm better at the second when I've got the first." For the company, pick one specific, checkable thing: a product you've used, a decision they made, a market they're in, someone you know who works there. One true, specific reason beats four generic ones. Nobody expects you to have dreamed about this company since childhood; they expect you to have had a reason to apply beyond the salary, and to be able to say what it was.

"What's your greatest weakness?"

Why it's difficult. Because it's a trap with a well-known exit, and the exit is also a trap. Everyone knows not to say "I have no weaknesses." Everyone also knows the trick of naming a weakness that's secretly a strength — "I'm a perfectionist", "I work too hard" — and every interviewer knows it too. So you're left choosing between sounding evasive and sounding unemployable.

How to answer it. Pick a real weakness that is (a) true, (b) not central to this job, and (c) something you've visibly done something about. Then give it in three parts: the weakness, a concrete example of it costing you something, and what you now do differently. "I'm bad at delegating. On my last project I kept two tasks I should have handed over and we lost a week. Now I write the handover list before I start, not when I'm overloaded." The example is what makes it believable. The fix is what makes it safe. Avoid weaknesses that are really personality defects (impatient with people, bad with criticism) and avoid anything the job advert lists as essential.

"Where do you see yourself in five years?"

Why it's difficult. Because nobody knows, and the truthful answers ("not here", "I'd like your job", "with a lot more money", "I haven't thought about it") all sound bad. It also arrives disguised as small talk, so people under-prepare it, and then they hear themselves saying "I just want to keep growing" and know it's over.

How to answer it. The interviewer isn't asking for a prediction; they're checking whether your direction and the company's can overlap for a reasonable period. So answer in terms of direction, not position: what you want to be good at, what kind of responsibility you want, what you want to have done. "In five years I'd want to be the person people come to for X, and to have run something end to end at least once." Then connect it to the role: this job gives me more of X, or exposes me to Y. Don't name a specific title, don't say "your job", and don't say anything that implies you'll leave the moment you've learned what you came for, even if that's exactly the plan.

discuss

Is there any way to answer "why do you want to work here?" that doesn't involve a degree of performance?

Try the three-part weakness answer, using a real weakness. Did the example make it more convincing or more worrying?

"Don't say you'd like your interviewer's job." Why not? Isn't ambition supposed to be attractive?

Is there a question in your country's interviews that candidates from other countries would find bizarre?

Interviewer (Hannah), candidate (Pavel).

Second-round interview for a project coordinator role at a design agency.

What do you think of Pavel's response?

discuss

What did you make of Hannah's question?

What could she possibly have been looking for?

Have you ever been asked something like this? What did you say?

Where exactly did Pavel's answer go wrong?

Was he right that the question tells her nothing about project coordination? Did saying so help him?

How would you have answered?

'Creative' interview questions

Somewhere around 2010, the big tech companies and a handful of consultancies started asking questions that had nothing to do with the job: brain-teasers, hypotheticals, "if you were a…" questions. The official reason was to see how candidates think under pressure with no prepared answer available. The unofficial reason was that interviewers were bored. Google later admitted, publicly, that its brain-teasers predicted nothing about job performance and dropped them. Plenty of companies didn't get the memo, and the questions are still out there, now joined by a softer kind that's meant to show personality or "culture fit".

Ten real ones

How many golf balls would fit in a school bus?

If you were a pizza delivery driver, how would you benefit from a pair of scissors?

What would you do if you found a penguin in the freezer?

Describe the colour yellow to someone who's blind.

If you were a brand, what would your motto be?

What's your favourite 90s song?

If you had £40,000 to start a business, what would it be?

Who would win in a fight, Spider-Man or Batman?

How to answer them

Don't challenge the question. You may be right that it's pointless; you will not be hired for saying so. Take the pause you're offered. "Let me think about that for a second" is a complete sentence and buys you five seconds that look like composure. For the estimation ones (golf balls), the number is irrelevant; the method is the answer. Talk through your assumptions out loud. Get a number. Say it with a straight face. For the "if you were a…" ones, pick fast, pick one thing, and connect it to one quality you'd want them to remember. A spatula: flexible, gets into corners, does the unglamorous work that makes the dish happen. Done. Don't audition three options. For the taste ones (90s song), they're checking whether you're a person. Have an opinion. Make it brief. Make it lightly funny if you can and don't try if you can't. Whatever you say, finish on a full stop, not a question mark.

task

Each of you has four questions. Add a fifth of your own invention.

Then interview each other, alternating.

Answer in a clear presentation voice; aim for thirty seconds; no "that's a strange question".

Student A

If you could have dinner with anyone from history, who would it be — and what would you be hoping to get out of it professionally?

How many cups of coffee are drunk in this city on a Monday?

You're stranded on an island with your current team. Who takes charge, and is it you?

What's something everyone in your industry believes that you think is wrong?

(your own)

Student b

If you were a piece of office furniture, which one would you be?

Convince me to buy a winter coat. It's July.

What's a skill you have that you'd be embarrassed to put on your CV?

If this interview were a film, what genre is it, and how does it end?

(your own)

reflection

Which question (from the list, the task, or your partner's own) was the most creative? What made it good?

Were any of them fun to answer / ask?

How did you do? How did your partner do?

If you were hiring a new English teacher, what creative question would you ask to find out whether they were any good, and what answer would worry you?