What kind of animal are you?

“If you could be any animal, what animal would you be?”

The first time you hear this question in an interview, you gape at the interviewer in bewilderment, eyes bugging out slightly, as you make a rapid judgement about their mental well-being. This is a job interview, you remind yourself, and it was going okay until they popped this beauty at you. Anyway, recovering quickly, you mumble some response, give some lame justification, and the interviewer goes merrily on to ask something else equally strange. Finally, it’s over, and you make a hasty exit, still a little bewildered.

After the interview (which did not get you the job, by the way) you hurry home and look up, “if you could be any animal interview question”. And get about 125 million results. About something called behavioural interviewing.

For the uninitiated and the innocent, what most people call a behavioural interview is one in which the interviewer, without qualification or expertise, tries to figure out what kind of person you are, or at least those traits of your personality that they consider relevant to the job at hand — like “problem-solving style” and “out-of-the-box thinking” and “result-oriented . . . ness”. This they think should be done by asking absurd questions, because, as everyone knows, trying to answer an absurd question in a time-constrained, stressful and judgemental situation such as an interview always causes people to reveal their true nature and personality. Microsoft and Google say so, and they are always right, don’t you know.

I’ve never yet been asked about my beastly fantasy, but once upon a simpler time, when I was just a wee lad, a delightful interviewer did ask me how many eggs a peacock laid in one clutch. Quite taken aback, and completely ignorant of peacocks’ egg-laying prowess, I only managed a weak, “Uh . . . six?”, which, of course, was quite wrong; the right answer, as he then smugly told me, was — none. Because the pea-cock doesn’t lay eggs, the pea-hen does. And here I was, young and foolish, thinking that he was using the word peacock conversationally, generically, like you’d say horse instead of stallion or mare, or deer instead of stag or doe without getting too hung up about their actual gender. I assure you I definitely knew that the pea-cock doesn’t lay eggs, but the interviewer evidently thought I was a dingus — or maybe not “detail-oriented” enough — because he ended the interview soon after that flaming disaster.

Interviewers have wised up since then; not all behavioural interview questions are this ridiculous any more, and some are actually quite dignified. Which somehow makes them even more insidious, because they seem so genuine. Like the interviewer actually wants to know the real you.

Below, I’ve picked out a few such questions, ones that sound respectable and interview-worthy — and while not in the same league as “What kind of animal would you like to be?”, they’re quite common. I find that they fall somewhere between mildly annoying and downright useless, but you decide for yourself. And there are only a few here, otherwise this would be an interminably long article. I poached them from none other than mighty LinkedIn, but if you want the full list, well, you have 125 million search results to go through.

The interview starts off well enough. “So . . . tell me about yourself” is a typical opener, and it isn’t terrible, but it usually leads to an abrupt dive into the candidate’s work history. I’m rather partial to, “What’s been keeping you busy recently?” One could answer that in any number of ways, from work-related stuff to passion projects; the probability of having a warm human conversation, I’ve found, is higher this way. Like, if you were to ask me today what’s been keeping me busy, I’d tell you that among other things, I’m learning Spanish — and wouldn’t that be a more interesting ice-breaker than a stiff monologue on my daily work?

Anyway, somewhere after, “Tell me about yourself”, I’ll get this: “What would you say is your greatest strength?”

I’m not terribly great at “selling myself”, but as a software engineer, who’s been stood in front of a whiteboard and asked to write real code a bajillion times, I’ve come this close to replying with, “Well, after six hours of using a whiteboard as a terribly deficient programming environment, I’ve discovered that my greatest strength is to be able to endure the mind-numbing tedium of programming like the Mesopotamians did — writing cuneiform on clay tablets with reed styluses — which is exactly what it feels like to write actual code on whiteboards with markers, and just as unnatural.”

Happily ignorant of this legitimate concern, the interviewer then offers the next delight, the very opposite of the previous one, “What is your biggest weakness?”

I’ve long since learnt to reply to this with some variation of, “Well, let me introduce you to my wife, she’ll tell you all about my weaknesses. In maddening detail. Right from the day I was born.” Each time I hope they’ll take the hint, chuckle, and move on, and each time my hopes are dashed.

Conventional interviewing wisdom says, tell them something that only seems like a weakness, but spin it as a strength. In other words — a humblebrag. So now I give them some piffle about how I’m a perfectionist, and how that’s such a terrible character flaw, and how I’m trying to lighten up, et cetera, et cetera. But it feels insincere, it feels like I’m putting on a show, you know what I mean?

The reason for this question, I’m told, is to figure out whether or not a candidate is self-aware, cognizant of their own flaws, humble enough to admit to their own mistakes. Perhaps it’s to get a sense of what kind of colleague they’d make, whether they’d get defensive in their yearly review, or whether they’d accept others’ ideas over their own, things like that. How you can gather all that from just one question, I haven’t the faintest idea, but even if I were so self-aware, would I really tell a complete stranger my deepest, darkest, “biggest” weakness? Would you? In a job interview? Tell them your weaknesses? Exactly. Besides, I can always look this stuff up, can’t I, complete with examples and illustrations? There are . . . let’s see . . . 12,750,884 answers to that question online. So it doesn’t actually do anything, does it, it’s really just empty theatre.

Close on the heels of, “What is your greatest weakness”, comes, “Why should we hire you?”

For the life of me I can’t figure out when during the interview is the best time to be asking this. It doesn’t make much sense to ask before the interview because we’ve barely exchanged pleasantries; you don’t just ask someone who walked into your office, “Hey, why should we hire you?” And anyway, all the reasons you want to hire me are already in my LinkedIn profile and in my résumé — which you should have in front of you, with your notes in the margins (or why would you ask me for a résumé otherwise, right?)

After the interview, when you’ve spent two hours actually talking to me, it makes even less sense. If two hours of conversation and all the other things you asked me to do haven’t convinced you that I’m eminently qualified and exquisitely personable, which is really all you need to know, I don’t think anything I say will change that.

The third reason, well, for the third reason, I’ll just let you watch this Instagram story. A friend sent it to me, and I just couldn’t resist sharing.

And then I get this: Why do you want to work here?

Of all “behavioural” interview questions, this I find to be far and away the most supercilious. I bet if I replied with, “Well, why do you want to hire me?”, you’d bristle with indignation. “How dare this puny human assume I’ve already decided to hire him?!”

And you’d be right. You haven’t decided yet. You can’t have — it’s too early. You’re just considering me as a potential colleague right now. So why shouldn’t I, too, be just considering you as a potential employer? Think of it as a . . . well, kind of as a date. A rather grotesque kind of date. You swiped right on my buzzword-splattered résumé, I swiped right on your HR-mangled job description, and here we are, sitting across this table, making awkward conversation. At this point, only the opportunity is interesting for me; I still want to figure out what it might be like to work with you, just like you want to figure out what it might be like to work with me. I want to know if you fit in with my cultural expectations just as much as you want to know if I do with yours. It’s a discovery process; it’s too early to say whether I want to work at your company. An interesting job advertisement doesn’t imply a supportive, caring, engaging place to work. It’s like your Tinder match asking you, the very first time you meet up for coffee, “So . . . why do you want to marry me?” Unless you definitely put a matrimonial ad on Tinder, wouldn’t your reaction to that be an incredulous, if not outright horrified, “What the . . . bleep?!”? Even if you both are a match made in heaven (in the Department of Accidents and Catastrophes), neither of you is ready for a commitment right now, no?

But maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe all you really want to know is what I know about your company, what made me decide to apply for this position. And that’s a fair expectation — you do want me to have done my homework, taken some initiative to learn about the company, visited the website, gotten some ideas, prepared some questions.

So if that’s really what you want to know, then ASK me. Directly. “What do you know about us that got you interested in this position?” I’ve found that that pretty quickly gives you a sense of how much effort someone has put into their company research.

On to the next one then: “What would your coworkers say about you?”

There’s only one time this is a good question — which is when you already know my coworkers, and know what they think of me, and you’re considering hiring me as your organization’s resident psychic. Then, like Albus Dumbledore interviewing Sybill Trelawney, the purpose of the question is merely to see how proficient I am at divination [1].

Have you ever had a candidate who said anything in reply to this question but happy, fluffy things? Right. So what keeps me from saying happy, fluffy things too? You aren’t likely to meet my coworkers. Asking me what I think they say about me is quite the waste of time.?

. . .

Now, there are likely a few of you who disagree — some rather vehemently — with my characterization of the behavioural interview. Once your visceral reaction to my contrarian viewpoints is tempered by rational thought, I hope you’ll agree, even if begrudgingly, that if a candidate asks the interviewer any of these questions, they might be considered impertinent or inappropriate: “Mr. Interviewer, what kind of animal would you like to be?” “Madam Interviewer, what do your coworkers think of you?” And then maybe you'll see that questions such as these are terribly useless. Really, as predictors of behaviour and personality, only the lines on your palm or your astrological chart are more useless. But like most things in the corporate world, even the simple act of engaging a potential colleague in conversation turns into a smothering, “process-driven”, “results-oriented”, “best practice” method of interrogation, under which cheesy corporatisms, beloved of HR managers, the tiny seed of human connection withers and dies. Why else would you think that in a couple of hours — half a day tops, let’s say — you can ask enough questions, or delve deeply enough into a person’s experiences, mindset, thoughts, emotions and behaviours to understand them so completely that you can decide whether they are the best match for your little job? Is it any wonder that employers continually whine about not finding good people, while also continually insisting on asking irrelevant, asinine questions that have no bearing on the actual work?

But despite all my contrarian views, I do realize that the odds are stacked heavily in favour of employers; candidates usually have little choice but to “play the game”, to learn to craft ambiguous, buzzword-y answers that they think interviewers might want to hear. Like Kryptonite to Superman, the need for a new job drains away the power to stand up to such undignified questions.

It doesn’t have to be like this. It can be better. You can make it better. You can make the promise that when you hire, you’ll dispense with such irrelevant questions. It serves your organization better if you focus on the abilities of the person who wants to work there, instead of on their fantasy of turning into an orangutan.

It’s also a bit insulting that you ask these probing questions of someone who’s in the vulnerable situation of needing a new job, or, in these troubled times, any job. So have a little empathy, a little grace, get off your sanctimonious derrière and walk a little in your candidates’ shoes. Be human — not a soulless automaton that reduces live breathing people to checkboxes on contrived quizzes of personality.

But wait — the worst is still to come. After all this probing and prodding, you decide, let’s pretend, that Sybill is not up to scratch. Then what?

If she’s lucky, Sybill will get a stock rejection message from HR, in which the HR minion didn’t even care to replace “Dear candidate” with “Dear Sybill”. But never mind that, what does she hear from you, the actual interviewer, the hiring manager herself?

A. Big. Fat. Nothing.

Why?

Well, because, in professional relationships, as in personal ones, ghosting seems to have become the accepted mode of rejection. And if you’ve ever been ghosted before, you know that it only adds insult to injury. Ghosting sends the message that the candidate — who spent time and effort into finding this opportunity, into meeting with you, into preparing for this interview — doesn’t even deserve common human courtesy. Yes, I know, you’re busy, or maybe uncomfortable being the bearer of disappointing news, or even feeling a pang of regret having to reject a hopeful candidate who only wanted a better opportunity. But it shows the kind of person you are when you do the right thing despite them all. It shows your behaviour, your personality, your culture — everything you wanted to evaluate in the candidate. And you too were a candidate for a job once. You too have faced rejection before. Has it jaded you so much that you must avenge it on your own candidates by being rude to them? Or were you always such a boor that you can’t even politely say, “No, thank you”? Ghosting is the coward’s way, and it’s callous and shallow. People never forget how you made them feel, and they definitely never forget if you made them feel wretched.

Uncomfortable it might be, but it’s just a decent thing to say, “Dear Sybill, I’m sorry to have to let you know that we can’t hire you right now because we really need someone more experienced with prophecies.”

That’s already more considerate than what most hiring managers do, but you can go a step farther. Since you’ve already identified the skills you found wanting, you can offer some resources for improving them too. Maybe it’s a meetup group, a skill-building website, or free online courseware. Someone once did that for you, now it’s your turn to pay it forward.

Perhaps you can say, “Dear Sybill, I’m sorry to have to let you know that we can’t hire you right now because we really need someone more experienced with prophecies. Although it didn’t work out this time, I was quite impressed by your passion for Divination. Which is why I wanted to recommend some resources for you to use to build your Divination skills. Do check out the meetup group Divining the Indivinable, the people there are super helpful. There are free tutorials at hotairtutorials.com/divination too, and I’ve also heard good things about the book Prophecies: A Primer for Believers of Astrology, Numerology, Palmistry, and Other Magic by Nost Radamus. I wish you the best of luck, and I’m happy to stay in touch if you need anything.”

For far too often, we’ve believed that interviews should be formal, to-the-point, interrogative. Maybe we haven’t had many informal, expansive conversations with strangers in a professional situation. Or maybe we think friendliness, feelings, life stories don’t belong in the workplace — even though those are exactly what makes us human, just as surely as working collaboratively does. Or maybe it’s our insecurities and habits that make us heavy-handed, and we overcompensate by turning interviews into interrogations. Otherwise interviews are merely conversations, just two people talking to each other to see if they both would like to work together. It’s not hard either — you only have to see a candidate as a fellow human being, with hopes and fears, challenges and aspirations, dreams and desires, rather than as a body for hire or an extra pair of hands for rent. And then everything falls into place.

So thank you in advance for reconsidering your interview process generally and your “behavioural” interview process particularly. And while you’re at it, might I tempt you to reconsider the phrase Human Resources altogether? It’s really quite the oxymoron.

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[1] We first meet Sybill Trelawney, Divination teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, although it is only in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that we discover the true circumstances of her hiring by Albus Dumbledore.