Prepare For Bad Interview Questions

One of the guarantees I’d be willing to make with any job seeker is that you’ll be asked unusual, strange, weird, and possibly illegal questions during an interview. I’ve surveyed several audiences of job seekers over the years and, in the majority of cases, more than half the audience was asked what appeared to be an illegal, personal question. However, equally concerning – and unfair to job seekers – are the strange questions that are asked. The reasons for this appear to be several:

• Many interviewers base their questions of some “favorite question” they think makes it certain they’ll make a good hiring decision.
• Some interviewers believe that asking “clever” questions make the candidates uneasy and shake them from their “canned” answers.
• Most interviewers, particularly the hiring managers, conduct interviews infrequently.
• Despite the popularity of interviewing skills as a training topic, the majority of people conducting interviews are untrained.

The bottom line is that there is a very high likelihood you will be asked bad questions by an untrained interviewer. Based on my informal polls of audiences ranging from college students to active job seekers, it is close to certainty.

In a previous series of articles, I analyzed the “favorite” interview questions of several executives. I also provided how some of the bad questions could be answered. That is the answer to this reality. To address the problem of bad questions, you simply need to be prepared. And even though you cannot prepare for all the possible bad questions out there, you’ll discover that if you’ve practiced providing great answers to good questions, you’ll also discover that you’ve learned how to answer even some of the worst of the bad questions. Here’s one: “What color are you?”