Stress interviews

The idea is to see how candidates deal with the uncomfortable and the unexpected

The National Aviator’s Guild has taken strong offence to certain alleged comments made by SpiceJet executives while interviewing pilots of the grounded Jet Airways. The statement from the pilot’s union came after an interviewer from SpiceJet reportedly told some Jet pilots that they were doing a charity by hiring them. Since SpiceJet has denied the charge, it should get the benefit of the doubt, but toxic job interviews are not uncommon.

Such interviewing done cowboy-style, shooting questions from the hip are usually conducted by companies that have a poor work culture or by some arrogant corporate giants that think anybody would like to give their arms and legs to work for them. What these interviewers do not realise is that candidates who go through such interviews are given front-row seats to the ugliest side of the company they are dealing with, damaging its ability to attract talent.  

But a difficult interview need not be a toxic one. For example, a candidate was unnerved when one interviewer on the panel just sat there and acted bored (even yawned a couple of times) when she was answering. But what she was experiencing was a variation of what is known as a “stress interview” where the aim is to trip up the applicants and see how they respond to the uncomfortable and the unexpected. There is obviously no right or wrong answers here — the interviewer is more interested in the candidate’s demeanour when she answers. The purpose is to see whether she is able to answer with confidence and coherence under “stress” situations. 

Stress interviews can take the form of tricky questions, some of which sound simple but turn out to be difficult to answer in a concise way. There are several such examples from Google. Career website Glassdoor provides a glimpse of the types of brain-stumping puzzles Google has asked in the past. A candidate for the post of account strategist was asked: “If you wanted to bring your dog to work but one of your team members was allergic to dogs, what would you do?” Another for the post of quantitative analyst was asked the following: “A coin was flipped 1,000 times and there were 560 heads. Do you think the coin is biased?” And an intern was asked: “Estimate the number of tennis balls that can fit into a plane.”

These are classic stress interview questions, the idea being getting candidates to think creatively, to stare at a problem and come up with a potential solution. The first question that once stumped a highly successful professional was: “Talk about the failures in your career”. Here he was ready to showcase his success stories, how he cornered the last business deal worth crores, and all that his prospective employer wanted to talk about was his failures? He mumbled something, but the next question was even more stressful: “Tell us when you get bored”. The candidate struggled hard for an “interesting” answer, but that’s where he faltered. HR heads say a smart and honest answer to such questions usually separates the men from the boys.

If the professional thought the questions were deliberately designed to insult him or not to give him the job, he would have been wrong. Such questions are a recognition of the fact that fairy tales don’t exist in corporate life and failures are inevitable. The idea is to find out the insights people gain from those failures. Sometimes, the interviewer tries to throw you off balance with unexpected behaviours. For example, an interviewer might ask the same technical question several times, pretending not to understand the answer, as the candidate gets more exasperated at the questioner’s stupidity.

However, some HR practitioners say the theory that people who can handle stress in an interview can handle stress on the job is wrong. The confrontational nature of a stress interview tends to make people guarded and defensive, and prevents interviewers from seeing the real person and his competencies. While the jury is out on that, here is an example of a stress interview that went off quite well. After a set of “hostile” questions that she handled with poise, a candidate was asked to talk about a time when she had to work with a difficult person. She smiled and her answer was immediate: “Sir, allow me first to talk about a time when I had to face really difficult interviewers”.

She was hired.