I’ve been meaning to say this for a while. I hate any job interview question that starts with “tell me about a time when…” It’s just sooo cheesy and often totally irrelevant. I get that they are trying to see how you handle yourself and get you to draw on an experience, but it is just such nonsense. I play along, but I’m just too real for this kind of scripted dollhouse crap. It’s like, I want to say “well that’s happened to me thousands of times, as you can see by looking at my resume I’ve been in this field for over 10 years. I don’t want to pinpoint a specific scenario because well there are too many.” Of course you can’t say that though if you actually want the job, so you just have to make some stupid story up and hope that they move on to something less retarded.

They would be better served to narrow the field by asking questions that actually pertain to the job instead of these canned creamy corn questions that just entice people to make up weird stories. Especially if you have a lot of experience, it’s hard to take that kind of line of questioning seriously, and I will admit I always lose some respect for recruiters and interviewers when their questions degenerate into such assembly line frivolity. On the spot queries like “what would you do in this situation?” are much better. I have worked with enough incompetent people in my day and seen enough high turnover to know that they definitely are not making the most of “having their pick” in a tough economy by conducting interviews in this fashion. I mean, you’d be better off asking if the job candidate knows the difference between words like “you’re” and “your” or “lose and “loose.” Then at least you would find out if they can operate at a third grade level in their daily communications. That should help eliminate 95% of applicants.