Nice article on LinkedIn: How to Answer Stupid Job Interview Questions
One of the comments below it just made my day:
Interviewer: “so what is your greatest weakness?”
Candidate: “honesty”
Interviewer: “I don’t think that’s a weakness is it?”
Candidate: “I don’t give a $#%€ what you think!”
I am not a person who gets interviewed often, so I don’t remember which questions I had last time and even when this last time was, but I may assume such questions and such answers sometimes can be seen for sure.
Whenever we are interviewing someone, we normally first tell person what we are doing in the company and what kind of things are around, so that he gets a better understanding. Then we ask a person to tell about him/her in order to get an idea of what (s)he was up to and so on. Finally we try to find a point for cooperation between us as a company and person as a possible employee. If there is such intersection – the rest is up to financial and other conditions which we try to satisfy.
Maybe this approach has to do with the nature of the profession, where all skills are needed and the more you have at a high level – the better it is. I really don’t see much use of asking questions like “if you were an animal, what kind of animal you would be?”. Normally we can just take couple of current/past cases/issues and ask person to give an idea on how (s)he would solve it. Most of the cases are rather non-standard and forces to think a bit. This is exactly what we need – thinking person who can sort issues, not an animal of some kind :-)