7 ms·

I had a candidate once. He was way overqualified for the position, so I asked him "Why do you want to work for us?" He said he doesn't, he just wanted to "sha

I had a candidate once. He was way overqualified for the position, so I asked him "Why do you want to work for us?" He said he doesn't, he just wanted to "sharpen his interviewing skills". He was very surprised I have unceremoniously ended the meeting immediately.

dsr_ 5y ago
Suppose he had said: "The market is heating up and I'm looking around. You look like you're doing interesting work, and I think that I could prove my real value to you in a relatively short amount of time."
- stickfigure 5y ago
  > "Why do you want to work for us?" "That's what I'm here to find out. Tell me, why should I pick you?"
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    This is bad take, very unlikely to get any favors from the recruiter. You are trying to show your superior position but are doing quite badly from negotiation standpoint. You are showing you are not at all interested in mutual profiting from the cooperation but rather only what you can get for yourself. It is possible this gets overlooked or you might even get somebody impressed, especially if they are an engineer and share the sentiment, but very unlikely if it is going to be your future manager and he doesn't know anything else about you. Here is better way if you really absolutely need to go this route: "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed." Everybody knows you want to profit. Here you show it may even be possible for this to be beneficial to both sides.
    - myWindoonn 5y ago
      What you've revealed in this thread is a callous greed and desire to exploit your employees. But none of us are impressed by that. Rather, what we want in an employer is somebody who will leave us alone and not harm the world. It is up to you to show us that you're a respectful and decent employer. At the end of the day, it's not like you could write your own code. So you need to beg us to work for you, not the other way around.
      - notahacker 5y ago
        It's not "callous desire to exploit employees" to prefer not to hire candidates whose ego isn't so enormous they think interviews should consist of employers begging them, or indeed to prefer to hire the candidates that have enough motivation to take the job or at least basic social skill to be able to think of a reason it might be interesting or suited to them. Candidates usually get the opportunity to ask the employer what's good about working for them at the end of the interview if the interviewer hasn't spent the entire interview emphasising it anyway, and also have the opportunity to say no if they're not impressed. If their answer was "we're the ones with cash, and you're the one who's short enough of cash to be interviewing here", I suspect quite a lot of candidates would pass....
        stickfigure 5y ago
        These two positions ("employer is trying to exploit me", "candidate expects employers to beg them") are both ridiculous strawmen. Employment is little different from dating. If someone asks "tell me why you want to date me", you're well within social norms to demand they answer the same question first. It's a rude question that attempts establish a mental framing and nobody over the age of 25 should be swayed by stupid jedi mind tricks like this. Any employer who expects candidates to beg for positions is probably an abusive prick. Any employee who demands to be treated like a primadonna is probably too annoying. Great, now let's move on to the part of the interview that matters: Do we like each other? That's a two-way information exchange. If someone fed me that "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed" line in an interview I'd struggle not to write them off as a B-school ass-kisser. There's nothing genuine about it.
        notahacker 5y ago
        I'd have said "candidate expects employers to beg them" was a straw man if I wasn't replying to someone literally insisting that's the role of the interviewer. Would have said much the same about comparing interview questions to Jedi mind tricks! And tbh if someone asked me interview style questions during a date I'd run a mile... It's not a "stupid Jedi mind trick" to ask people why they want a job, it's a pretty straightforward way of finding out whether they have a particular skill, interest or aspiration that might lead to further relevant questions and a filter to remove people who either don't want the job, haven't read the job spec, think they're too important to answer questions or somehow both realise that framing matters and think framing themselves as uninterested is a good move. "I am here to find out how I can help you succeed" or regurgitating the list of the company's "principles" off their website probably comes off as fake, "no, you tell me why I should take the job" certainly comes across as egotistical: perfectly acceptable answers include talking about being good with their tech stack, knowing their market, looking for a more senior role or wanting to find a new employer that values x more (do you value x?) and can include followup questions. I go back to my earlier point: if you get to the inevitable point in the interview where you're asking them questions and their answer to what's good about the job or what they like about the company is "no, what's good about you" or "um....", the alarm bells start ringing. The whole point of interviews being a two way information exchange is not setting off the same alarm bells in employers' minds
    - AQuantized 5y ago
      The term "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed." rings so untrue to me. I'd have to resist the temptation to roll my eyes.
    - BeetleB 5y ago
      > You are trying to show your superior position but are doing quite badly from negotiation standpoint. I'm not trying to do that at all. The question makes sense if I apply to your company. The reality is that it's a recruiter who contacted me cold. They need to tell me what their needs are and why they contacted me. What you describe makes sense if there is a 2-way conversation and 2-way data sharing. In most of my interviews, it's always going in one direction, and then the company perfectly describes this sentiment of yours: > You are showing you are not at all interested in mutual profiting from the cooperation but rather only what you can get for yourself. with "you" being the company/manger/interviewer. I'm happy to have a detailed conversation on how I can help the company, if you're ready to have a detailed conversation about how you can help me. When they ask me if I have any questions, I often say "Sell this position to me." They never have a prepared answer. In fact, they never have good answers to any behavioral question I ask them, but somehow they expect me to have good answers.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    That just makes you sound like you have no idea what the company does, and you're only here because a recruiter said they have a great ping-pong league (which is pretty common, actually, I've had candidates who couldn't describe what the company does). But it's a fine answer if you can remove that aspect. "Oh I'm interested in a company that does Widgets, and I hear your company is one of the best in the Widget business. Tell me, is that true?"
- lmilcin 5y ago
  It doesn't matter. I just expect an intelligent answer that reflects understanding of the circumstances in which you, as a candidate, are in. I also look for signs that you might be bad fit, a risk, a fraud or a waste of time. We all know that most people don't exactly love their jobs. I think it is fine. Just because I do doesn't mean everybody has to. You can still be productive without being workaholic and abandoning your friends and family and promising eternal love and devotion to your company. But I am also obligated to find people that will actually help the project and bring value to the company and try to find a compromise between seeking perfection and filling positions. On that end I need to somehow judge, from a very limited amount of information during a very broken process if it is worth to continue with somebody. If you can't find a semi-convincing answer to a question you should have expected to be asked, there is probably some problem with you. Do I really want to spend effort trying to figure it out?
  - throwaway088 5y ago
    All good points. Why do you want to work here is just a dumb question for this purpose. It basically forces me to lie and say you guys sound awesome instead of just saying your company ticks the right boxes for me. Have you ever asked your plumber or handyman why they want to work for you ? Same circumstances, there also you want someone passionate.
    - icedistilled 5y ago
      it's very different in some ways and the same in another. In this situation it's not the same. There is no real online review of software jobs seekers. There is word of mouth recommendations of who is good at their job like with a trade. In plumbing and short contract jobs it matters less what the company does, it's a one off job. If one were hiring a short term contractor dev then it would be the similar, not a full time dev. For a full time software hire it makes sense to ask their motivation of where they want to spend most of their waking time. There's a huge different between someone just working for money who'd work at a pay day lender just as willingly as working at an outdoor lifestyle brand versus someone into that brand. Most situations will fall in between, but who would you hire, the person who has some connection to the field or something about the company, or just wants to earn a buck and doesn't care.
wffurr 5y ago
You helped him sharpen the skill of never putting all your cards on the table. Having a convincing answer to that particular question other than "I need to pay the rent and think maybe I wouldn't hate this job" is a key interviewing skill.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  I pretty much always go with a straight answer like I need to pay the rent. Also when people ask where I see myself in ten years, I always say retired. When they ask about career growth I always say I’m already at the top of my game. What you call a “convincing answer” strikes me as ceremonial dishonesty.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    You want to be snarky, it is your choice. But from my experience this is just going to show you don't understand how to behave befitting the situation. When you are meeting your family do you tell them to their face that you don't want to sit with them because you have something more interesting to do, or do you play the game and try to extricate yourself gracefully? It is the same thing, really. Showing you know how to behave. Both sides might be playing a game, but the fact you are playing the game shows you have comprehension and you are a player. If you show you are willing to make problems on such a simple question you may leave impression you are unreasonable and nobody wants to work with unreasonable divas, even if they are highly capable.
    - throwaway2048 5y ago
      A company is not your family, the pretense that you are super interested in working this job instead of doing what you actually want in your life, and if you do anything else except toeing that line you are an unacceptable candidate is frankly nauseating. Nobody is being a "diva" by upfront stating things everyone already knows, but lies about. It doesn't require being an asshole about it either.
      - deleted 5y ago
paxys 5y ago
I had an interview recently where the hiring manager went through his usual list of questions ("why do you want to work for us?" "Why are you looking to switch?" "what interests you about the role?") and my only answer was "your recruiter hounded me for weeks and begged me to do this interview."
- BeetleB 5y ago
  This is how all my Amazon contacts with recruiters go. They contact me N times a year (one particular recruiter emailed me 3 times in 2 months). Then at some point in the conversation, they always ask "Why do you want to work for us?" My response is always "You contacted me, not the other way round."
- cutemonster 5y ago
  > my only answer was "your recruiter..." What did they say after that?
stuart78 5y ago
sounds like you helped him sharpen his skills.
HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
If that was his answer, then yeah, he really needed to sharpen his interviewing skills!

dsr_ 5y ago

Suppose he had said: "The market is heating up and I'm looking around. You look like you're doing interesting work, and I think that I could prove my real value to you in a relatively short amount of time."

stickfigure 5y ago
> "Why do you want to work for us?" "That's what I'm here to find out. Tell me, why should I pick you?"
- lmilcin 5y ago
  This is bad take, very unlikely to get any favors from the recruiter. You are trying to show your superior position but are doing quite badly from negotiation standpoint. You are showing you are not at all interested in mutual profiting from the cooperation but rather only what you can get for yourself. It is possible this gets overlooked or you might even get somebody impressed, especially if they are an engineer and share the sentiment, but very unlikely if it is going to be your future manager and he doesn't know anything else about you. Here is better way if you really absolutely need to go this route: "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed." Everybody knows you want to profit. Here you show it may even be possible for this to be beneficial to both sides.
  - myWindoonn 5y ago
    What you've revealed in this thread is a callous greed and desire to exploit your employees. But none of us are impressed by that. Rather, what we want in an employer is somebody who will leave us alone and not harm the world. It is up to you to show us that you're a respectful and decent employer. At the end of the day, it's not like you could write your own code. So you need to beg us to work for you, not the other way around.
    - notahacker 5y ago
      It's not "callous desire to exploit employees" to prefer not to hire candidates whose ego isn't so enormous they think interviews should consist of employers begging them, or indeed to prefer to hire the candidates that have enough motivation to take the job or at least basic social skill to be able to think of a reason it might be interesting or suited to them. Candidates usually get the opportunity to ask the employer what's good about working for them at the end of the interview if the interviewer hasn't spent the entire interview emphasising it anyway, and also have the opportunity to say no if they're not impressed. If their answer was "we're the ones with cash, and you're the one who's short enough of cash to be interviewing here", I suspect quite a lot of candidates would pass....
      - stickfigure 5y ago
        These two positions ("employer is trying to exploit me", "candidate expects employers to beg them") are both ridiculous strawmen. Employment is little different from dating. If someone asks "tell me why you want to date me", you're well within social norms to demand they answer the same question first. It's a rude question that attempts establish a mental framing and nobody over the age of 25 should be swayed by stupid jedi mind tricks like this. Any employer who expects candidates to beg for positions is probably an abusive prick. Any employee who demands to be treated like a primadonna is probably too annoying. Great, now let's move on to the part of the interview that matters: Do we like each other? That's a two-way information exchange. If someone fed me that "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed" line in an interview I'd struggle not to write them off as a B-school ass-kisser. There's nothing genuine about it.
        notahacker 5y ago
        I'd have said "candidate expects employers to beg them" was a straw man if I wasn't replying to someone literally insisting that's the role of the interviewer. Would have said much the same about comparing interview questions to Jedi mind tricks! And tbh if someone asked me interview style questions during a date I'd run a mile... It's not a "stupid Jedi mind trick" to ask people why they want a job, it's a pretty straightforward way of finding out whether they have a particular skill, interest or aspiration that might lead to further relevant questions and a filter to remove people who either don't want the job, haven't read the job spec, think they're too important to answer questions or somehow both realise that framing matters and think framing themselves as uninterested is a good move. "I am here to find out how I can help you succeed" or regurgitating the list of the company's "principles" off their website probably comes off as fake, "no, you tell me why I should take the job" certainly comes across as egotistical: perfectly acceptable answers include talking about being good with their tech stack, knowing their market, looking for a more senior role or wanting to find a new employer that values x more (do you value x?) and can include followup questions. I go back to my earlier point: if you get to the inevitable point in the interview where you're asking them questions and their answer to what's good about the job or what they like about the company is "no, what's good about you" or "um....", the alarm bells start ringing. The whole point of interviews being a two way information exchange is not setting off the same alarm bells in employers' minds
  - AQuantized 5y ago
    The term "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed." rings so untrue to me. I'd have to resist the temptation to roll my eyes.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    > You are trying to show your superior position but are doing quite badly from negotiation standpoint. I'm not trying to do that at all. The question makes sense if I apply to your company. The reality is that it's a recruiter who contacted me cold. They need to tell me what their needs are and why they contacted me. What you describe makes sense if there is a 2-way conversation and 2-way data sharing. In most of my interviews, it's always going in one direction, and then the company perfectly describes this sentiment of yours: > You are showing you are not at all interested in mutual profiting from the cooperation but rather only what you can get for yourself. with "you" being the company/manger/interviewer. I'm happy to have a detailed conversation on how I can help the company, if you're ready to have a detailed conversation about how you can help me. When they ask me if I have any questions, I often say "Sell this position to me." They never have a prepared answer. In fact, they never have good answers to any behavioral question I ask them, but somehow they expect me to have good answers.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  That just makes you sound like you have no idea what the company does, and you're only here because a recruiter said they have a great ping-pong league (which is pretty common, actually, I've had candidates who couldn't describe what the company does). But it's a fine answer if you can remove that aspect. "Oh I'm interested in a company that does Widgets, and I hear your company is one of the best in the Widget business. Tell me, is that true?"
lmilcin 5y ago
It doesn't matter. I just expect an intelligent answer that reflects understanding of the circumstances in which you, as a candidate, are in. I also look for signs that you might be bad fit, a risk, a fraud or a waste of time. We all know that most people don't exactly love their jobs. I think it is fine. Just because I do doesn't mean everybody has to. You can still be productive without being workaholic and abandoning your friends and family and promising eternal love and devotion to your company. But I am also obligated to find people that will actually help the project and bring value to the company and try to find a compromise between seeking perfection and filling positions. On that end I need to somehow judge, from a very limited amount of information during a very broken process if it is worth to continue with somebody. If you can't find a semi-convincing answer to a question you should have expected to be asked, there is probably some problem with you. Do I really want to spend effort trying to figure it out?
- throwaway088 5y ago
  All good points. Why do you want to work here is just a dumb question for this purpose. It basically forces me to lie and say you guys sound awesome instead of just saying your company ticks the right boxes for me. Have you ever asked your plumber or handyman why they want to work for you ? Same circumstances, there also you want someone passionate.
  - icedistilled 5y ago
    it's very different in some ways and the same in another. In this situation it's not the same. There is no real online review of software jobs seekers. There is word of mouth recommendations of who is good at their job like with a trade. In plumbing and short contract jobs it matters less what the company does, it's a one off job. If one were hiring a short term contractor dev then it would be the similar, not a full time dev. For a full time software hire it makes sense to ask their motivation of where they want to spend most of their waking time. There's a huge different between someone just working for money who'd work at a pay day lender just as willingly as working at an outdoor lifestyle brand versus someone into that brand. Most situations will fall in between, but who would you hire, the person who has some connection to the field or something about the company, or just wants to earn a buck and doesn't care.

wffurr 5y ago

You helped him sharpen the skill of never putting all your cards on the table. Having a convincing answer to that particular question other than "I need to pay the rent and think maybe I wouldn't hate this job" is a key interviewing skill.

jeffbee 5y ago
I pretty much always go with a straight answer like I need to pay the rent. Also when people ask where I see myself in ten years, I always say retired. When they ask about career growth I always say I’m already at the top of my game. What you call a “convincing answer” strikes me as ceremonial dishonesty.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  You want to be snarky, it is your choice. But from my experience this is just going to show you don't understand how to behave befitting the situation. When you are meeting your family do you tell them to their face that you don't want to sit with them because you have something more interesting to do, or do you play the game and try to extricate yourself gracefully? It is the same thing, really. Showing you know how to behave. Both sides might be playing a game, but the fact you are playing the game shows you have comprehension and you are a player. If you show you are willing to make problems on such a simple question you may leave impression you are unreasonable and nobody wants to work with unreasonable divas, even if they are highly capable.
  - throwaway2048 5y ago
    A company is not your family, the pretense that you are super interested in working this job instead of doing what you actually want in your life, and if you do anything else except toeing that line you are an unacceptable candidate is frankly nauseating. Nobody is being a "diva" by upfront stating things everyone already knows, but lies about. It doesn't require being an asshole about it either.
    - deleted 5y ago

paxys 5y ago

I had an interview recently where the hiring manager went through his usual list of questions ("why do you want to work for us?" "Why are you looking to switch?" "what interests you about the role?") and my only answer was "your recruiter hounded me for weeks and begged me to do this interview."

BeetleB 5y ago
This is how all my Amazon contacts with recruiters go. They contact me N times a year (one particular recruiter emailed me 3 times in 2 months). Then at some point in the conversation, they always ask "Why do you want to work for us?" My response is always "You contacted me, not the other way round."
cutemonster 5y ago
> my only answer was "your recruiter..." What did they say after that?

stuart78 5y ago

sounds like you helped him sharpen his skills.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago

If that was his answer, then yeah, he really needed to sharpen his interviewing skills!