4 ms·

I think it's valid question, the issue is just in the presentation. If you ask it with the attitude of trying to find people who are 1000% in love with the con

I think it's valid question, the issue is just in the presentation. If you ask it with the attitude of trying to find people who are 1000% in love with the concept of working at your very specific company then I think you're deluding yourself. Unless you're a world-famous company or your company has a very niche mission, it's unlikely that the applicant cares about working for you specifically. If, however, you ask it in the context of "why are you looking to leave your current job and why does this one interest you" then there's a lot of room to figure out where the applicant's expectations don't align with reality. I work for a small enterprise SaaS company in NYC. We get a lot of people interviewing who are coming from a long career working in banks. I always ask why they want to go from working in a bank to working at a company like ours. Sometimes it turns out that they won't get what they're looking for if they come work with us and that's a discussion worth having. It's all about managing expectations

rafiki6 9y ago
So why isn't the question phrased "What are your expectations of how we work here?" or something along those lines? If the goal of the question is to address the motivations of the person applying for the job to determine if there's any mismatch with the companies mission than "why do you want to work here" is absolutely the wrong test.
- dozzie 9y ago
  >> "why are you looking to leave your current job and why does this one interest you" > So why isn't the question phrased "What are your expectations of how we work here?" Because it's not the same question at all. I don't know what to expect from your work practices yet, but (a) you work at a big scale and I'm interested in that, or (b) you use Erlang/Ada and I'd like to use that professionally, or (c) you make CNC machines and I'd like to move to writing industrial hard-realtime code, or a number of similar reasons before you even know what the company looks like from the inside.
wink 9y ago
In the limited amount of recruiting I did it was a very very low bar to filter out people who didn't even spend 5 minutes reading the company website about what we do. (Didn't always ask this question literally, I'm lumping it together with "Do you already know what we do? Where did you hear about us, etc.pp") No, I'm not talking about enumerating all the products and the website wasn't good either, but I was shocked how someone would turn up to an interview without having done the minimum amount of research.

rafiki6 9y ago

So why isn't the question phrased "What are your expectations of how we work here?" or something along those lines? If the goal of the question is to address the motivations of the person applying for the job to determine if there's any mismatch with the companies mission than "why do you want to work here" is absolutely the wrong test.

dozzie 9y ago
>> "why are you looking to leave your current job and why does this one interest you" > So why isn't the question phrased "What are your expectations of how we work here?" Because it's not the same question at all. I don't know what to expect from your work practices yet, but (a) you work at a big scale and I'm interested in that, or (b) you use Erlang/Ada and I'd like to use that professionally, or (c) you make CNC machines and I'd like to move to writing industrial hard-realtime code, or a number of similar reasons before you even know what the company looks like from the inside.

wink 9y ago

In the limited amount of recruiting I did it was a very very low bar to filter out people who didn't even spend 5 minutes reading the company website about what we do. (Didn't always ask this question literally, I'm lumping it together with "Do you already know what we do? Where did you hear about us, etc.pp") No, I'm not talking about enumerating all the products and the website wasn't good either, but I was shocked how someone would turn up to an interview without having done the minimum amount of research.