Is That A Trick Question?
Interview questions are trick question, the trick is giving the answer you want
I’ve been doing a lot of interviews in the past while. Which means I’ve been asked a lot of questions. A lot of the same ones crop up over and over, and some questions really do feel like trick questions that have a right and wrong answer. Thinking about one particular question I was asked today?—?Where do you see yourself in 5 years?—?I realized that not only was it a trick question, but the trick is on there interviewer, not me. See the trick to these questions is to answer the question with the information you want the person to know.
So just like how I handled the “when are you going to decide what you want to be when you grow up” question —
https://medium.com/@trishussey/sometimes-you-have-to-call-bullsh-t-c2b3f63cd478
— I answer the 5 year vision differently than people might expect.
Look, I didn’t plan any of this
When I’m asked the 5 year plan question the intro to my answer is always “if you had asked me five years ago I’d be doing what I’m doing now, I would have given you a completely different answer than what happened.” Because my varied and broad career?—?which I’m very proud of by the way?—?has come to pass mostly from happenstance, luck, and seizing opportunities as they came up.
Undergrad, I wanted to do Anthropology as my major. No Anthro major then, I did an independent major. That led me to Geology. So when a friend did the Senior Scholars program in the Geology department. I thought that would be cool to do and that led me to grad school.
Grad school to running a lab. Running a lab to tech support. A friend there was teaching himself HTML. I said, hey, I’d like to learn too…
Which led to working for big pharma and creating a crap ton of websites…
Which led to moving to Canada to doing the same thing…
Later came consulting. And blogging. And marketing. And…
You get the point here. My narrative is that regardless of the plan I had at the time (be a Geology professor, be a Dir of IT or CTO, be whatever), fell to the wayside when something cool, interesting, and awesome fell into my lap. I seized opportunities. I took risks. I learned new skills. That’s my narrative.
And that’s not the answer people expect.
Which is exactly what I’m going for.
Be your own answer
Interviews are equally a potential employer sussing you out and you sussing them out. I want to know about them, they want to know about me. In interviews my plan is very simple. Be me. I’m passionate. I’m adaptable. I ask good questions. I do my homework. My goal (and it should be yours as well if you’re in an interview) is to give people a good sense of me. People can read all my stuff online?—?there are literally thousands of posts and articles to choose from?—?they can get a sense of how I approach marketing or content or social media through my work that is already out there.
What I do in an interview is to fill in the rest of the picture. The quirky, geeky, writer who loves tech. I create my own answers to paint that picture.
Don’t give the answer they want, give the answer that’s who you are
Yeah, there are trick questions. Silly questions. And “why on Earth do you want to know that” questions. In the end, I believe the only right answer to the question is the one that shows who you really are.
And, yeah, this is all me.
Want to learn more? LinkedIn is the best place.
