As a job seeker, I thought a lot about employer interview questions, but I was still surprised when I suddenly found myself on the other end of it. The way you think about job interviews questions when you are looking for jobs is much different than the way you think about them when you’re looking for the right employee. Being able to see it from both sides has really enhanced my understanding of the whole interviewing process, its merits and its faults.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that, when I was a job seeker, I look at employer interview questions with a decidedly hostile feeling. It seemed to me that the questions were designed to try to catch me out as it were. An employer would understandably try to post tricky questions for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, they wanted to do see my job interview preparedness. They want to make sure that I’d taken the proper time and effort to get ready for the job to make sure that I was really interested in it. On the other hand, they wanted to test my ability to think on my feet. Asking hard job interview questions puts someone in a very stressful position. You are suddenly thrown off-guard while trying to make the best impression possible. There is no better way to test someone’s mettle than to put them off their guard.

As a human resources specialist, however, I have a decidedly different view of employer interview questions. My goal isn’t really to catch people out – at least not primarily. I’m not even really trying to test general skill or level of preparation. Mostly, I use employer interview questions to see if they are a good fit for the job. The idea of meritocracy is deeply flawed. You’re never looking for the best job candidate, so much as the one who is the best match. Sometimes, a more menial task demands someone with a less acute intelligence and a greater store of patience for routine, repetitive processes. If I find someone really sharp and ambitious, I would not hire them even if they might be altogether more capable. The job will ultimately make them unhappy, and their productivity will decline. Those are the kind of people you try to hire somewhere else – perhaps higher up the food chain – but you do not place them in menial tasks. No matter how smart they are, they won’t do that job very well.

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