'Where is next November?'

Never have job interviews been so tough. Employers, disenchanted with old-style interview questions, are now moving towards a fresh, task-based format, writes FIONA REDDAN

REMEMBER THE DAYS when preparing for an interview meant studiously learning by heart answers for questions such as: “What motivates you” and “How do you work under pressure”? Well, these days, employers are opting for an approach that has a lot more in common with the hit TV show The Apprentice than those of days gone past.

According to William Poundstone, who tackles the topic in his new book, Are you smart enough to work at Google?, you can forget about being asked what your hobbies are in an interview. The new style interviews are all about probing, apparently meaningless, questions.

“Never have job interviews been tougher. This is the bitter fruit of the jobless recovery and the changing nature of work,” he notes.

Alan Coleman, chief executive of Wolfgang Digital, a specialist in Google AdWords, agrees that old-style interview questions no longer come up to scratch.

“Everybody is very well prepared for interviews now, so it’s hard to get a sense of the real person. Often quite a different person is behind the interview face,” says Coleman, adding that “an activity or task-based exercise helps us get a better sense of the person and gives us more of an insight into their skill set.”

In this respect, a good indicator of how someone will perform in a digital marketing job is their prowess in data-driven strategy games like fantasy football.

Indeed at the interview stage, Coleman will often ask people if they play the game and in one case he was so impressed by the candidate’s score that he “spit and shook there and then” on the job.

Digital marketing is akin to fantasy football he says, because it’s “about monitoring data, and making decisions based on what you’re seeing. Instead of picking players you’re writing ads, and monitoring their performance”.

“For these reason I would be more impressed with a candidate who has a degree in maths and plays fantasy football or poker, than somebody who has a degree in marketing,” he says.

Another approach he likes to take is to ask someone to work out a sum, and talk through how they work it out. And his interview process also includes a task, which he concedes, does make it “a little bit like The Apprentice”.

Coleman is far from alone in taking such an approach. In his book, Poundstone gives numerous examples of tricky questions now asked by employers such as Google.

He says that “open-ended mental challenges, like the “thrown into a blender“ question (see panel), are an attempt to “measure mental flexibility and even entrepreneurial potential”. This is important, he says, because if you’re hired to do one job at a fast-growing company such as Google, you may end up doing something else in a few years.

“The more offbeat questions attempt to gauge something that every company wants but few know how to measure: the ability to innovate,” he writes in his book.

In programming bible The Mythical Man-Month, the author Fred Brooks gives his favourite interview question as such – one which has since been appropriated by other computer companies.

“I have long enjoyed asking candidate programmers, ‘Where is next November?’

. . . The really good programmers have strong spatial senses; they usually have geometric models of time; and they quite often understand the first question without elaboration,” he says.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, then perhaps you’re just not cut out for being a programmer. If it does, chances are you enjoy taking such a view on things – which might make you attractive for all those employers out there now looking for numerate candidates.

At Susquehanna International Group, which runs a proprietary trading operation on Dublin’s docklands, numeracy skills are key – as are being able to answer them in the intensity of an interview situation.

The firm used to run a poker competition to try and attract suitable candidates, but now relies on asking logic and probability questions to identify new recruits.

“We’re looking for people who won’t necessarily have studied maths to any great detail, but we need them to be very competent with numbers and in understanding probability,” says senior trader David Murtagh.

And if you’re struggling with the probability question about tossing coins asked in the panel below, it may be that a trading job just isn’t for you.

“We look for people that like that kind of stuff. It’s kind of a natural selection process; people who don’t enjoy it don’t apply,” he says.

And if you’re attracted by the lure of poker, it may not also be for you. While Susquehanna have poker training nights one night a week – “there are huge analogies between poker and the type of trading we do,” notes Murtagh – the firm is not looking for people who just get a “buzz out of gambling“.

In addition to an emphasis on logic and numeracy, employers are also opting for questions that appear to come out of nowhere.

Some of the more unusual questions Laura McGrath, a director of Careerzone, has come across in her work advising candidates include: If you were the finance minister what would you put in the budget?; Are you suspicious of people?; and Why do people climb mountains?

But why do interviewers ask such awkward questions and what do they hope to gain from them?

For McGrath, it’s all about working out how a candidate acts when they are put on the spot, and she advises that “a bit of humour is often a good way out of these sticky questions”.

For example, if you’re asked, What keeps you awake at night?, McGrath suggests that you want to portray that you are well able to handle highly pressurised situations at work and are equally capable of switching off at the appropriate time.

“You want to show that you can recharge your batteries and are able to come into work the next day, fully refreshed with a fresh perspective and ready to take on the next challenge,” she says.

And before you think it’s only interviewers that are to blame, spare a thought for those interviewers that had to keep a straight face when presented with the following responses to that classic of the genre, What’s your biggest weakness?

Some of the more out-there responses to this question McGrath has come across include: “Women with big bums”; “drink”; or “an accountant who said they were not very comfortable with numbers”.

So perhaps it’s no wonder that employers are taking a different approach.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: COULDYOU PASSTHE NEW-STYLE INTERVIEW?

Q1: You have a jar with three coins in it, two of the coins are regular heads and tails, but the third coin has a head on both sides. You dip in and pick a coin at random, toss it three times, and given that each time you get a head, what's the probability when you toss for a fourth time it will be another head?

Q2: You are shrunk to the height of a penny and thrown into a blender.

Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
Q3: At 3:15, what is the angle between the minute and hour hands on an analog clock?

Q4: How many integers between one and 1,000 contain a three?

A1: 90 per cent.

A2: According to Poundstone, this is typically asked at Google. Popular

answers include you lying on the floor or standing to the side of the blades, but the best answer is to assess the impact of a decrease in scale – while your mass will be smaller, your muscle energy won't be proportionally as small – which means you should have enough energy to jump out of the blender.

A3: At 3:15 the minute hand will be

pointing due east, at the three. The hour hand will already have moved one-quarter of the way from three to four . The span between three and four is one-twelfth of a full 360 degree turn, or 30 degrees. Divide that by four and you've got the answer, 7.5 degrees.

Q4: 271.