Why Don’t You Take a Seat Over There: How to Engage and Make the Interviewee Want to Talk to You

Ask any therapist or social worker what the most difficult part of his job is/was, and he won’t tell you how difficult med school was or how hard it is to keep up with all the medicine and new (and soon to be rendered statistically insignificant) methods of psychological evaluation. Instead he will tell you how hard it is to make a connection with the client, that first impression is what makes or breaks the rest of his hundreds of sessions, something that is inexorably the most harmful thing to his career. It is essential that you have a good ice breaker, if you’re writing, your ice breaker might be a sentence that hooks the reader. If you’re selling a product your ice breaker is to appear as hip as possible by stealing the millennials’ lexicon to convey how with the times you are, and totally not like the other boomers. When you’re conducting an interview, you must convince the interviewee that you are worth the time that you are borrowing from them, that which they could have spent procrastinating or contemplating their midlife crises. You must make the interviewee want to talk as much as possible and feel safe around you, without thinking of you as an outsider. Like a borrowed friend who will reveal to you what he truly feels about a given topic rather than have him parrot that which you could have found from the safety of your home through Google. Some people attempt to form characters when interviewing like Sacha Baron Cohen who presents himself as gormless, so the interviewee feels a certain level of safety in revealing his ideals for he believes he will not be subject to any scrutiny or resulting admonishment at all. You cannot and should not force your interviewee to be as nonchalant as possible from the get go so start off with some safe questions to establish a bit of background info such as:  Tell us a little about yourself (Where are you from? Where did you go to school? Describe your job and how long you’ve been at it). From here, it is a bit of a heuristic wherein you must put on your social intelligence hat and use synthetic reasoning to start with something rather benign and have it eventually transformed into a conversation where there is more important dialogue than trite one. If you simply parrot off the questions you have prepared like a robot, the interviewee would be turned off by your lack of genuity and reply back with halfhearted answers wherein superficial information (that you could have actually just found from google) is touted as the facts of life, giving you false expectations for your life after your 4 years and leading you to question the benefit of obtaining an education doing something you never truly enjoyed in and of itself but enjoyed the concept of. It is important to make this distinction now before your midlife crisis, whether you enjoy engineering or any given field because you are good at it, or whether your interest precedes your talent. In other words, confront the interviewee on how one would consolidate the task of determining whether he enjoys engineering because he is good at it or if he is good at engineering because he enjoys it. For if it is the former, then as soon as you run into major difficulties (as are to be expected in the hard knocks of life), and when your peers start outperforming you with less effort, then suddenly you might find that your interest never existed at all. And if it is the latter reason that you chose engineering then you have truly been fortunate enough to be genuinely passionate about something that is so high in demand. You must confront the interviewee about this proposition and how, if at all one should even bother confronting this psychological conflict. For although there is bliss in ignorance, there is no greater shame to have merely existed without living. You must also be weary of justifications being post hoc that are only ever arrived at as a coping mechanism and to avoid genuine confrontation with your own self. It should be the conclusions that you have arrived to a priori that should justify the phenomenon that you have yet to experience. For this is what they call principle and eventually belief.  You need to confront your interviewee who has already had these thoughts (and engage them in a manner where they feel safe sharing such information) so you can truly get a feel whether you want to spend the next 50 years of your life (that’s like college level stress but for around 12 four-year degrees) to be working this job. Is engineering the solution for sense of purpose for the interviewee (and by reflection, yourself) to be able to confront a difficult problem, to struggle against it, and to resolve it with odds good enough to keep you coming back? You have to (with the help of the interviewee) confront the dilemma of the possibility that if you were genuinely challenged (both physically and cognitively) in other non-scientific ways, and had to use your intuitions and concepts in clever ways every other day, would you, at the end of your long days’ worth of hard work, come to the comfort of your home and engage in your hobby engineering? Would you still feel like that there exists a void in your heart that is left incomplete without engineering? And if you were to choose to do engineering as your day job, but as soon as you get home you throw away all your engineering jargons, you put all of your colleagues calls to voicemail, so you can dissociate, in your hobby that you are passionate about, if only just for a moment. How would you discern whether it is your hobby that should be your day job or your day job that should be your hobby? You need help in arriving to the solution for which the interviewee exists. He exists solely to help you confront these answers. His life is as important only to the extent to which it is relevant to you.

And now I feel like there exists a duty on me to help clear up this misconception on the heuristic that many have developed on what questions are the wrong questions to ask. I read many interview questions that said that you must abstain from all questions relating to politics and to personal relationships. And although it is true to some extent, I do not agree with the dogmatic absolutism to which they are currently perceived as. You should (and I encourage you) ask the interviewee how much time he is able to spend with his family (if and only if you expect to start your own family when you grow old). But don’t say, “Hey does your wife hate that you’re home only 3 hours a day and you always smell like petrol?” Beat around the bush and ask in a roundabout manner, “How long do you work in a given week, and how much of that work is also translated over to your home where you must allocate time on the weekends to read and keep up with the newest engineering tricks?” From this you can deduce, if you are interested in raising a family later in your life or would like to be able to assign importance (with none having lexical priority over the other) to both work and family. But only do this if you are indeed interested in familial bonds later in your life and would like to see what amount of time you would be spending with them but consumed in other tasks relating to work. The other question that is the wine to the holy grail of bad questions seems to be anything relating to politics or religion and again I claim that this is not necessarily the case. If you are a woman in engineering (yes, a real-life female in engineering), you might be interested in how women deal with the boys only club that is engineering and the work place’s blatant and commonplace sexism. You might also be interested in the double burden that women face wherein they must work eight hours a day (probably more according to this one engineer on google) and then are expected to go home and do the unpaid domestic labor while your husband is not conventionally expected to contribute anything to his fair share of the domestic labor, sometimes not even child rearing. Thus, most women would be interested in gender politics, and this interest which the cannot satiate if asking questions pertaining to such topics is forbidden. Similarly, you might also be interested in religious politics as in how it feels like working as minority X in field dominated by group Y. I have proved the case for women, but I believe the same synthetic reasoning can be applied to any other fears you might have either it being your religion, race or something else. But, don’t be upfront and confrontational about such a touchy subject, try to ask it in a roundabout manner and if you feel like your relationship with the interviewee is good enough, you might even be upfront about it. It all depends on your social assessment of the situation. However, one bad question (atrociously bad that risks tarnishing the genuine bond established between you and the interviewee) is the cursed generic question. This is by far the worst type of question you can ask. The worst offender is the soliciting of general advice on a topic as vague as the meaning of the Rosetta Stone. “What general advice do you have for a college student who is pursuing a major in X engineering?” This type of question will be met with a superficial response of “Just work hard, keep your chin up, and never give up. Keep networking and keep studying.” As you might have noticed, these cognitions are merely analytic rather than synthetic and what is worse is that they are merely fluff phrases that you have heard since before you left your cradle. Cookie cutter questions beget cookie cutter answers. On a final note, because this rant is kind of going on more than it needs to, it should be interesting to note the type of questions that some make it their priority not to ask, is something that they are expected to ascertain through this interview. There exists a contradiction, which I may attribute to, as things as of representations and things in and of themselves. For it is the representation of a subject that precedes the thought of the subject. For instance, consider the question that someone in some thread said you should not ask “Can you hook me up with a job after this?” That is the concept of networking misrepresented and it is the faulty representation that leads to false conclusions of the act of networking as negative in and of itself. Or the question “Who was your worst client so far?”, which seems like a rather blunt way of asking “What was the most difficult client you faced so far and how did you resolve the situation that arise from the confrontation? What did you learn?” The former is what you ask after you have had a few drinks with your business partner, the latter is what you ask when you are a college kid trying to steal the wisdom of a person he met yesterday on reddit and only met so because his grade depended on it.

I have purposely not truncated my paragraphs into easy to read bullet points because I believe if I do so, it will miss the forest for the trees and will have disastrous misunderstandings. The paragraph structure allows me to explain the intuition behind my claims and argue for and against other equipollent claims and rational cognitions.