Posted on 01/14/2012 9:16:49 AM PST by Kaslin
I know! You love your job. It may be boring and dreary, but you're loyal. You'd never leave a solid, horn-rimmed, school librarian of a company for a sexy, starlet-type temptress of a firm that promises you wild salaries, sizzling stock options and all the limelight of a Hollywood premier.
But just in case you're curious what it would be like to live on the employment red carpet, let's talk about your chances for getting a gig at Google.
For the average Joe or Jane, the chances aren't particularly great. According to "How to Ace a Google Interview," a William Poundstone essay in The Wall Street Journal, Google receives a million job applications a year. And while I am 110 percent certain that you would stand out in any crowd, the sobering statistic is that only about 1 in 130 applications results in a job.
Fortunately, you have an attribute that should make it quite simple to beat those odds -- you're pretty darn odd yourself.
Yes, at Google, weirdness works. The company is looking for oddballs, and the hiring process is based on bringing out the weirdo in you. If you doubt it, consider one of the questions recently asked in a Google interview:
"You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced, so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?"
For the average applicant, this is a tough question to answer. For an oddball like you, it's a piece of cake. The other candidates have to speculate. With your twisted brain, you've probably been preparing for this eventuality for years! (In fact, your plan to swim to the top of the banana smoothie being prepared in the blender is not an acceptable answer to Google. They prefer their applicants to calculate that even in a shrunken-down state, the density of your muscles would be sufficiently powerful to let you jump out of the blender. This may be the right answer if you believe the so-called "laws of physics," but you would never get to suck up all that free banana smoothie.)
It's not surprising that an out-of-the-box company like Google is trying to cull out-of-their-minds candidates. What is truly weird is when the same tactics are adopted by very much in-the-box companies like AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and Bank of America.
According to a survey on Glassdoor.com, cited by author Poundstone, AT&T is asking candidates "If you could be any superhero, who would it be?" Considering the 20 calls a week I get from AT&T, I would imagine that correct answers are "Rude Man," or "Super Pest."
Johnson & Johnson's question du jour is "what color best represents your personality?" I don't know a lot about the corporate culture of this big player in the world of big pharma, but the company recently admitted to bribing European doctors and agreed to pay $70 million in civil and criminal fines, so I'd say that the best color to be might be prison-jumpsuit orange.
My favorite weird question is from one of our least favorite companies -- Bank of America. The bank is reported to be asking candidates, "What animal are you?" Considering all the controversy over B of As lending and pricing practices, I would think the best answer would have to be a "weasel." Of course, this is very unfair to weasels, to whom I apologize.
As Poundstone explains, the shift from straightforward to twisted interview questions comes at a time when many people are questioning the effectiveness of traditional human resource recruiting techniques. It seems that despite the rigor of a traditional resume and reference review or an insightful interview with a highly trained HR professional, "the deep, dark secret of human resources is that traditional job interviews don't work very well."
This may be big news to the HR department, but to the rest of us viewing the cavalcade of clowns brought in as managers, the failure of the current system is no surprise. Of course, in your current company, actually working for these losers will not be a problem. Just as soon as you submit your application and ace the job interview, you'll be working at Google. Imagine -- you and a bunch of people who think they can jump out of a blender.
By those standards, a wacko like you will feel right at home.
Have to wonder what it would do to an applicants chances if he were to say his favorite animal was a gerbil...
My father was an HR exec, his job was recruiting salesmen. He did mostly college recruiting. He went to a college, interviewed about 50 or 60 young fellows, and picked out the one or two who would make a good salesman.
This job is an art, something you can’t really learn without a lot of experience and having the knack for it. He was very highly paid because he was quite good at picking the right ones.
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Blender question: walk to the stem take off my belt wrap it around the stem and my wrists place feet on inside of blender ‘chops’ and enjoy the ride.
Superhero: DC Earth X composite superman
Color: blue
Animal: duck-billed platypus
And those have been my answers for some time now.
Oh and I like peanut butter and whipped cream sandwiches.
I interviewed at Microsoft once. 6 hours of mostly odd questions - not as crazy as this article recounts, but still “out of the box” questions that require a deep understanding of what that box is.
While waiting my turn in the main recruiting building, I observed a guy come in and do the old (and now it is indeed becoming old) job-search tactic of showing up cold and insisting on giving his resume to someone in-person. Asked whether he had submitted online - and why he hadn’t - he became agitated because he had flown from Ottawa to Seattle (an expensive 6 hour flight one way) to follow the deprecated rule of thumb, only to be told in so many words that was a stupid thing to do. I still wonder if that was real, or a planned stunt to observe how candidates responded.
As too the blender question...I would remove my corporate jet from my wallet and fly out.
Blender: Run around the inside perimeter of the blender, using the generated force to allow you to slowly spiral your way up and out of the blender.
It "may be", but it is not. Somewhere in "the so-called laws of physics" is the matter of compressing a liquid, which is basically what the human body is.
It is more correct to say that it comes at a time when HR departments are looking for any reason whatsoever to pick qualified Candidate A over equally qualified Candidate B.
Asinine. No wonder a lot of large companies are so screwed up.
My husband had already been hired on one particular job a couple of jobs back, but soon he got after the job, the owner of the company and a few employees took him out to dinner. The owner asked my husband, “So tell us something about yourself we don’t know.” My husband responded, “Well, I like to wear lederhosen and pumps.” I think he’d fit right in at Google.
The answer to the blender question is quite simple. You are shrunken to a size less then the height of a nickel. This puts you well below the blades. So when the blades start moving, just lie flat on the bottom and ride it out.
Okay, my first sentence was a dyslexic mess.
See, you’re thinking outside the box (to use a worn out phrase).
He was joking I am sure
Yes—only kidding around (I hope ;).
I wonder what their faces were like when he told them?
I’m not sure what the reaction was, but it was a very small company and the boss/owner was pretty cool so he probably laughed. He carried at work and my husband could have too if he had had his conceal carry back then. They let people drink at work within reason. Very laid back place. My husband liked the place a lot, but he eventually outgrew the job and had to move on. He stayed there six years though and learned a lot.
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