Really bad interview questions!

This article in People Management caught my eye.

I thought that some of these questions had long since been dropped. When I set out into the world of work in the late 70s it was fair game to ask a woman of my age

• if I had a boyfriend
• if it was serious
• what kind of career he had
• how soon after getting married I would be having children

And I answered these questions in more than one interview!

I also had to face a panel of interviewers to join the Civil Service ( I ended up in the Inland Revenue  – taxes – despite applying to join the Foreign Office). It is ingrained on my memory for all the wrong reasons

• the panel was made up of 4 elderly (or so it seemed to me) very posh people who might well have spent all of their time sitting on interview panels
• they did not refer to my application form at all so I had to summarise it -from memory. Maybe it was to catch me out.
• I was asked the killer question – which character from history would I have liked to have been?

Oh my – I remember now the cold sweat breaking out and my mind going blank. I don’t remember them being anything other than kindly folks but I had not expected this out of the blue and I felt my chances of getting into the job were slipping away.

And then I blurted out “Queen Victoria” – with absulutely no idea why on earth I would choose her. Inevitably that was the next question. What I said in lost in the mists of time. But the final question – “did I think that there was anything between her and John Brown?” - led me to believe that all hope was lost. I have now seen the movie “Mrs Brown” starring Judi Dench as QV and Billy Connelly as John Brown but at the time I had no idea who he was let alone what their relationship might have been.

Anyway – I got the job albeit in an entirely different department to the one I wanted but in those days being a Civil Servant was something many people aspired to and certainly as a young lass from a council house and working class family background  it was considered to be  a real achievement.

I must have done something to satisfy the panel but I vowed that if I ever had responsibility for interviewing that my input would be clear, meaningful, fully explained and fair!