When you’ve amassed enough respect and distinction in your profession, you will inevitably be tasked to identify the next great mind, the one to replace you when you’ve grown your fingernails too long to type and all your new business ideas have to be gently massaged by a PR team before they can be shared with the stockholders.

Yes, interviews.  Those old fashioned person to person question and answer sessions covering topics like:

• Are you good enough to work here? We do very important work, you know.
• Are you showing the proper respect for my position as an interviewer? I’m very important, I assure you.
• If you were hired by Rahm Emanuel to wash every window in the city of Chicago, how much would you bill him? Please explain your reasoning out loud while I listen. Do not stammer.

Fun, easy, and definitely productive.  But a lot of people have asked me, “Sir,” everyone calls me sir, “how do you make sure that you’re only hiring the highest quality people? I don’t want the riff-raff coming to work for me, to do my bidding, to be judged weekly at a time of my choosing! I need someone with the charm to laugh at my jokes, the brains to follow my unstated directives, and the stamina to sit upright for the number of hours I choose!”

Fear not.  I have conducted several interviews.  Candidates have come before me, and I have judged them, and now, for one time only, I will reveal the secrets of my judgement to you, the reading audience of this blog.

My Method

Introductions are a waste of time.  Their name is on my calendar, so I already know it.  If they inquire about my Christian name, they’re disqualified.  That information is for my wife and my barber.

To begin the interview, I always like to take a moment to remind the candidate that i have intimate knowledge of their history.  Unbeknownst to them, I have a acquired a “résumé” (literally, a document). How my staff acquires the information in it is purposefully beyond my knowledge.  And frankly, I’d rather not know.  My secretary, Phoebe, can be frighteningly direct, once referring to me as “him” while I was within earshot, so I can hardly imagine how she behaves when I’m not around.

It’s always a good idea to put your candidate at ease by letting them know that you’ve read the “résumé“.  Why waste time rehashing what you both already know? I generally then make a personal inquiry about the candidate, something to give us a chance to get to know one another. An old standard opening line of mine is, “I know who you are and what you’ve been doing. Tell me about your nightmares.”

Now your candidate believes that, not only are you well informed, you have a personal interest in the people who will be extending your will into places below your station. In fact, what this person says next is irrelevant, I’d love to recount some of the nonsense that candidates spew at this time, but I’ve literally never heard any of it.  For you see, at this point, I have the fire alarm pulled.  If the candidate stands up, I kick his chair to the ground and have him dispatched by Phoebe, who has been hiding behind the couch at the back of the office. If the candidate remains seated with a cool even expression, as though nothing has happened, I place a handkerchief over my mouth and scream, “You’ll die today.”  Candidates who remain seated now fall into one of two categories: the brave or the deaf.  All other candidates are unacceptable.

I know what you’re thinking, “But, sir, what if the position I wish to fill requires a weak or hearing person?” Then I suppose we’ll have to resort to cruder methods of interrogation.

Standard Interview Questions

Having rejected my method, you are left to conduct a standard interview. Fine.  Here are the standard questions you should ask.  Take notes on every 5th to 10th sentence you hear, and nod throughout. Some of the questions below will be in the form of a statement. An order.  Take note of how the candidate responds to orders.

1. Tell me about your career.
2. What makes you want to work here?
3. Tell me about a time you went above and beyond your job duties to accomplish something about which you had serious moral reservations.
4. What is your greatest strength?
5. Tell me about a time you had a difficult relationship with a contemporary, and what steps you took to ensure that you could never be underestimated again.
6. What is your greatest weakness?
7. How many golf balls can you fit into a standard sized elementary school bus?
   • This question gets a lot of flak for being too esoteric to reveal anything useful about a candidate; your candidate’s answer can’t tell you anything except how well they answer strange questions. On the contrary, your candidate’s answer to this question tells you how many golf balls you need to fill a standard sized elementary school bus.
8. Give me a real life example of a work related conundrum this person might face.
   • The key to effectively asking this question is to make sure that there are clear demarcations between right answers and wrong answers.
     • On the rare occasion that I have conducted a standard interview, my usual example goes something like: Say you’ve received a package at your home that bears my return address.  I have given you no instructions about what to do with this package or what it might contain. How do you respond? A correct response is a cool steady gaze and the words, “I would deal with it.” A small nod is also acceptable.
       • One candidate told me he would contact me and ask for clarification about the standard procedure going forward for items like this.
       • Before I could speak a word, Phoebe had come out from behind the couch and dragged him out of the room.  I still have no idea how she knew what had happened, considering she is possibly deaf,  but I don’t ask.
9. Any questions for me?
   • This is a trap.  Any questions should be met with propaganda or dismissed, and a lack of questions is an indication of stupidity.

At this point you should have all you need to make your decision.  If this person is smart enough to know they should please you, but too stupid to ever represent a threat to you, then you have your new employee.

Closing Notes

With any luck, by now you have a new employee to act out your wishes and to act as a sponge for your emotions. Congratulations!  Remember, the purpose of having employees is to have them.  They are yours. Your job is to take their soft minds and scrape away all the extraneous garbage until each of them is a razor blade.  Your razor blade. To be used and discarded. Happy interviewing!