Over the years, I have conducted or participated in the hiring of many, many people, both while in practice and now as a manager at ICLE. Most interviews were done in teams, and I have been routinely impressed by the incisive questions coming from my fellow interviewers. As we were about to start a search for a new employee, a LinkedIn Pulse article on The Strange, Difficult Questions CEOs Ask in Job Interviews caught my eye.
Some questions mentioned in the article were similar to ones I have used: “Why have you had X number of jobs in Y years?” “What things do you not like to do?” Others are a little more unusual. One CEO likes to ask, “What’s your superpower … or spirit animal?” The person who answered, “A duck, because ducks are calm on the surface and hustling like crazy under the surface,” was hired as the CEO’s executive assistant.
High-tech companies may be more comfortable mixing up traditional interview questions with oddball questions like this to see how creative the person is and how well the person can think on his or her feet. I’m not sure how I would have responded to a spirit animal question if I were being interviewed. I might wonder about the interviewer’s sanity and whether I even wanted to work with this employer. But times have changed since I last interviewed for a job. And coming up with good questions that help assess how a person responds to an unexpected or oddball situation would be useful when filling a lawyer position.
Karen Brown, ICLE’s Administrative Director, has a checklist of questions that we often use when filling positions at ICLE. Do you have any good interview questions, oddball or not, that you are willing to share?