Many of our readers shared a version of the following as one of their favorite interview questions: “We are interviewing many people for this position. What are you going to bring to our team that others can’t?”
One reader added this aside: “It drives me nuts when applicants say they are team players and learn quickly. No one ever says anything like –“I’m bossy and a slow learner.”
Here’s an excerpt from my reply: “If you ask a question that gives you a canned answer 90 percent of the time, you may need to look at using a different question.
How about:
- “Give me a specific example of how you have excelled as a team player.”
- “What was the last thing you had to learn that was out of your comfort zone and how did you apply that new knowledge?”
- “Suppose we do hire you and it is four months down the road and I have to call you into my office to talk about something you are not doing the way I feel it should be done. What are we going to be talking about?”
This was originally published on Mel Kleiman’s Humetrics blog.