I’m having great fun collecting examples of “strange but true interview questions” and their answers. Some of which I’m posting onto Twitter for the enjoyment of my friends and followers.
One of my favourites is “If Aliens landed in your garden and offered you a job on their planet what job would it be?”.

Favourite interview answers
My favourite answer to the interview question “What’s your greatest weakness?” is still the candidate that responded “Kryptonite. I have yet to discover whether he (I presume it’s a he) got the job.

Other strange but true interview questions that caught my eye include:

• Why are manhole covers round?
• If you laid all the roads in the UK end to end, how many times round the world would they go?
• If you were a type of cheese, what cheese would you be?
• If you were a salad, what type of salad dressing would you choose?

Three Admirals
Another interview answer I like is for the selection board for the Royal Navy, made up of three retired Admirals, interviewing some school leavers. One candidate was asked to name three famous British Admirals. The answer came “Nelson, Drake… and I didn’t catch your name Sir?”
He didn’t get selected for insubordination which I think most unfair!

“What are the top ten questions that a team leader could ask at a team
meeting to generate discussion that will lead to team improvement” a good
friend asked me a few days ago.

I found providing an answer very difficult
because the questions a team needs to consider will depend upon the business
issues at the time, the maturity of the team and other factors. After thinking about it I told him that I
probably had a hundred questions I could ask and he challenged me to email
him one each day for the next one hundred days!

The first two questions have already been sent to him and then I got thinking that I could include the questions as a Tweet to all my followers.

So each day I will Tweet a question that could be asked and discussed at a team meeting. If you don’t want to miss these Tweets then “LIST” me on twitter so that you can have them sent directly into your list

Questions to ask at a team meeting that have been sent so far are:

“How does the team generate and progress new ideas?”

 and

“What level of clarity has the team of the expectations of it?”

Quite a stir was caused this morning on Twitter when I suggested that Lack of talent is the biggest obstacle to growth but many businesses don’t have tools to find and keep talent in place.

A couple of people suggested that this Tweet was bull**t and that “Tools don’t find and keep talent; you need good managers for that”. A sentiment, by the way, that I wholly agree with! However, good management rarely operates on its own and often needs to use techniques, models, processes and past experience to guide actions and decisions and these I call “Tools”. In fact I would add that utilising tools in this way is a sign of “Good management”. Trying to manage without tools is often identified as “poor management”.

Now I enjoy having my thoughts and articles challenged and contradicted, it’s what makes for good debate and learning and I’ve got used to my “pearls of wisdom” being dismissed by those unable to understand the subtleties of what I’m saying, but I do wish that they would do so using logic and experience. “Bull**t” is so difficult to reply to!