subject: Wild Card Interview Questions [print this page] Darwin's concept of "survival of the fittest" applies when you are interviewing for a job: the candidate who makes the best connection with the interviewer is usually the person who gets hired. According the economist, Sylvia Chase, over 60% of all hires are based on personal chemistry, not the candidate's education or experience.
How can you build personal chemistry during an interview? First, you have to realize the opposite truth: interviewers, by and large, do not seek to hire during an interview but rather, they seek reasons NOT to hire you.
Why? Every single job posting garners more than one rsum and therefore, a certain number of applicants are eliminated at the rsum stage. Often, more than one person will be interviewed. It is in this scenario that the interviewer usually has a mind set to exclude, rather than include, the candidate in front of them. Why? The parallel is dating: you may date many people before you marry just one.
As a result, certain interviewers have opted for a type of question called "behavior based," "wild card," or "psychological." Why? Books and counselors can help you prepare to answer the standard questions for an interview, carefully rehearsing with you how you would delineate your finest accomplishment at your previous workplace or which personal flaw you would change but books and counselors can't prepare you to handle wild card questions. What is the interviewer seeking? 1. That you DO NOT respond with a "deer in the headlights" reaction or let the room fill with five minutes of deafening silence. This is the absolute worst thing you can do. This can get you eliminated from the job, even if you aced the rest of the interview. 2. The interviewer wants to see if you can think on your feet. If you can think creatively on your feet, you get bonus points. 3. Your answers will help build personal chemistry with the interviewer if you show your ability to handle a crisis-like this question.
Here are several actual questions which were asked in different interviews and the candidate's answers:
Interviewer: If you could help one of Snow White's Seven Dwarfs, which dwarf would it be and what would you do?
Candidate: I'd help Sneezy by getting him an allergy medicine to handle that runny nose of his.
Interviewer: Do you remember those crossing jokes which were so popular? Like, "What do you get if you cross an elephant with a rhino? Elephino!" OK, describe yourself in terms of one character from children's literature and one other image.
Candidate: That's easy. I'm Tigger crossed with a racehorse. Tigger is always happy and joyful but he does not have a goal or a purpose. The racehorse has a definite goal: cross the finish line ahead of the other horses and win. As a college textbook sales person, my goal is to win-to cross the finish line and exceed my sales goals but to accomplish that infused with as much joy as I can gather. (The interviewer laughed for several minutes-and offered the author that job on the spot!)
Interviewer: If you could have dinner with any famous person in the world, living or dead, who would it be? What would you want to find out from them?
Candidate: I would welcome the opportunity to have dinner with W. Edwards Deming. While I've read his fourteen key points for transforming management to make it more effective, I'd love to find out whatever he didn't write down. That's information I could implement to improve quality in my work for your company.
Garnered from other candidates, questions can cover the very obvious, "see if you are paying attention" queries, such as:
When did the War of 1812 start? When does the 10 o'clock news start?
And then there are the very unusual questions such as:
1.If aliens landed in front of you and offered you any job on their planet, what job would you want? Why? 2.If you could be a superhero, what would your super power be? 3.If you could meet with any character in literature, who would it be and why? 4.What animal in jungle would you be? 5.What food would you be? 6.If you were a salad, what dressing would you be and why? 7.If you had six months in which all your living expenses were paid, what would you do with the time? 8.It's twenty years from now and you have passed on. The company newsletter runs an article about your career here at Wexford Widgets. What would the headline be? If you are in sales, an answer could be, "Bill Davis Is Top Sales Rep for the 20th.Year in a Row!" If you are in finance, "Rose Marley Finds a Way to Save $500,000 by Global Tax Planning!"
Should you prepare to answer all of these questions? Yes. Will you be asked all of them? No. Will you be asked some of them over time? Probably yes.
In the Tigger crossed with a racehorse answer, the candidate built personal chemistry with the interviewer. The interviewer was able to see that the candidate could focus that creativity to any work-related situation. The candidate was able to save herself from exclusion in the hiring process to become the one who was included in the firm. Quick thinking about Tigger and the racehorse helped that candidate be the fittest to survive in that hiring process. You can too.
