He was way overqualified for the position, so I asked him "Why do you want to work for us?"
He said he doesn't, he just wanted to "sharpen his interviewing skills".
He was very surprised I have unceremoniously ended the meeting immediately.
When you are meeting your family do you tell them to their face that you don't want to sit with them because you have something more interesting to do, or do you play the game and try to extricate yourself gracefully?
It is the same thing, really. Showing you know how to behave.
Both sides might be playing a game, but the fact you are playing the game shows you have comprehension and you are a player.
If you show you are willing to make problems on such a simple question you may leave impression you are unreasonable and nobody wants to work with unreasonable divas, even if they are highly capable.
Nobody is being a "diva" by upfront stating things everyone already knows, but lies about. It doesn't require being an asshole about it either.
Yeah, except don't think for a minute you're a player in that situation, you're the one being played.
By trying to endear yourself to the person you're going to spend 8 hours per day with for the forseeable future?
Look, I'm as anticapitalist as the next guy, but trying to make yourself appealing as a coworker in a job interview is not a sign that you're "being played". Having an appealing answer to the question "why do you want to work here?" isn't a symbol of class oppression, it's a common-sense attribute of work life.
Anyway, this approach has always succeeded for me, including when I told the fintech company that I wanted to work there because it was the job in my industry nearest to my house. Both sides seemed happy with the outcome.
I always find this reasoning confusing. As a reasonably competent engineer, I've always felt like I have many employment options open to me. Yes I need to pay rent, but I always have an honest answer to the question that goes well beyond that. If I only cared about paying my rent, I would go work for a FANNG and triple my salary. I don't, because there are genuinely much more interesting reasons to work for a particular organization than money.
What did they say after that?
"The market is heating up and I'm looking around. You look like you're doing interesting work, and I think that I could prove my real value to you in a relatively short amount of time."
We all know that most people don't exactly love their jobs. I think it is fine. Just because I do doesn't mean everybody has to. You can still be productive without being workaholic and abandoning your friends and family and promising eternal love and devotion to your company.
But I am also obligated to find people that will actually help the project and bring value to the company and try to find a compromise between seeking perfection and filling positions.
On that end I need to somehow judge, from a very limited amount of information during a very broken process if it is worth to continue with somebody.
If you can't find a semi-convincing answer to a question you should have expected to be asked, there is probably some problem with you. Do I really want to spend effort trying to figure it out?
Have you ever asked your plumber or handyman why they want to work for you ? Same circumstances, there also you want someone passionate.
There is no real online review of software jobs seekers. There is word of mouth recommendations of who is good at their job like with a trade.
In plumbing and short contract jobs it matters less what the company does, it's a one off job. If one were hiring a short term contractor dev then it would be the similar, not a full time dev.
For a full time software hire it makes sense to ask their motivation of where they want to spend most of their waking time. There's a huge different between someone just working for money who'd work at a pay day lender just as willingly as working at an outdoor lifestyle brand versus someone into that brand. Most situations will fall in between, but who would you hire, the person who has some connection to the field or something about the company, or just wants to earn a buck and doesn't care.
"That's what I'm here to find out. Tell me, why should I pick you?"
It is possible this gets overlooked or you might even get somebody impressed, especially if they are an engineer and share the sentiment, but very unlikely if it is going to be your future manager and he doesn't know anything else about you.
Here is better way if you really absolutely need to go this route:
"I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed."
Everybody knows you want to profit. Here you show it may even be possible for this to be beneficial to both sides.
At the end of the day, it's not like you could write your own code. So you need to beg us to work for you, not the other way around.
Candidates usually get the opportunity to ask the employer what's good about working for them at the end of the interview if the interviewer hasn't spent the entire interview emphasising it anyway, and also have the opportunity to say no if they're not impressed. If their answer was "we're the ones with cash, and you're the one who's short enough of cash to be interviewing here", I suspect quite a lot of candidates would pass....
Employment is little different from dating. If someone asks "tell me why you want to date me", you're well within social norms to demand they answer the same question first. It's a rude question that attempts establish a mental framing and nobody over the age of 25 should be swayed by stupid jedi mind tricks like this.
Any employer who expects candidates to beg for positions is probably an abusive prick. Any employee who demands to be treated like a primadonna is probably too annoying. Great, now let's move on to the part of the interview that matters: Do we like each other? That's a two-way information exchange.
If someone fed me that "I am here to find out how I can help you and your business to succeed" line in an interview I'd struggle not to write them off as a B-school ass-kisser. There's nothing genuine about it.
It's not a "stupid Jedi mind trick" to ask people why they want a job, it's a pretty straightforward way of finding out whether they have a particular skill, interest or aspiration that might lead to further relevant questions and a filter to remove people who either don't want the job, haven't read the job spec, think they're too important to answer questions or somehow both realise that framing matters and think framing themselves as uninterested is a good move. "I am here to find out how I can help you succeed" or regurgitating the list of the company's "principles" off their website probably comes off as fake, "no, you tell me why I should take the job" certainly comes across as egotistical: perfectly acceptable answers include talking about being good with their tech stack, knowing their market, looking for a more senior role or wanting to find a new employer that values x more (do you value x?) and can include followup questions.
I go back to my earlier point: if you get to the inevitable point in the interview where you're asking them questions and their answer to what's good about the job or what they like about the company is "no, what's good about you" or "um....", the alarm bells start ringing. The whole point of interviews being a two way information exchange is not setting off the same alarm bells in employers' minds
I'm not trying to do that at all. The question makes sense if I apply to your company. The reality is that it's a recruiter who contacted me cold. They need to tell me what their needs are and why they contacted me.
What you describe makes sense if there is a 2-way conversation and 2-way data sharing. In most of my interviews, it's always going in one direction, and then the company perfectly describes this sentiment of yours:
> You are showing you are not at all interested in mutual profiting from the cooperation but rather only what you can get for yourself.
with "you" being the company/manger/interviewer. I'm happy to have a detailed conversation on how I can help the company, if you're ready to have a detailed conversation about how you can help me. When they ask me if I have any questions, I often say "Sell this position to me." They never have a prepared answer. In fact, they never have good answers to any behavioral question I ask them, but somehow they expect me to have good answers.
But it's a fine answer if you can remove that aspect. "Oh I'm interested in a company that does Widgets, and I hear your company is one of the best in the Widget business. Tell me, is that true?"