Ask odd questions in your interviews
“Is it better to be nice or smart in the office? Please pick one and tell me why”
This question was a response to how billionaire entrepreneur Marc Lore builds great company cultures which create billion dollar companies. In his Impact Theory interview he says he prefers people who answer ‘nicer’ and encourages them to pick a side just to hear how they think.
I ran a Linkedin poll on that very question which came back with conflicting views and resulted with me being called both stupid and insightful from people I didn’t even know. But that part doesn’t matter.
What does matter is what these kinds of odd questions do for your HR strategy.
The value is neither in the question nor the given answer.
I’ll start by saying that interviews are observational. We want to engage with the interviewee in an unbiased way to give truthful answers on their skills, attitude and character. So why bother with odd questions if neither the question nor the given answer matters?
Because it’s one of those things where the process is more important than the product.
Firstly, it compels you to visualize the kind of human stepping into the shoes you’re laying out. Meaning, how would you prefer for them to answer this odd question and why?
And secondly, it demands them to articulate a top-of-mind answer to a question they weren’t expecting. They can’t google the answer to this. Let’s face it, how many companies make you pick between nice or smart? Not many.
Ultimately, this prevents you from interviewing on auto-pilot, and impels you (the leader/recruiter) to visualize the real-life character needed in your organizations success story instead of a plug n’ play person to tick off your task-list.
Depending on how and when you ask the question, it can help you:
Apply pressure to see how they perform in uncertainty, or
Reduce pressure from an onslaught of tougher questions
Start the interview on a conversational tone
Prompt a story or reasoning to hear why or how they would make a particular decision
Cross-check this answer with a previous answer from another question
And make sure you’re actively listening!
Now, normally that would be the end of this piece but I got curious. What do professionals think of this question?
Here are the results from the LinkedIn Poll.
(Answered mainly by English speaking management professionals, marketers, and entrepreneurs from the US, Singapore, Cambodia, New Zealand and Australia.
Funnily enough, Marc mentioned that roughly 60% of people in his interviews would say ‘nicer than smart’, and he suspected this was a mix of sincere answers and guesswork to say what Marc (the interviewer) wanted to hear.
From the 40+ comments from the poll, here’s what I found the most interesting:
For Leaders and Recruiters:
Thoughtlessly prioritizing ‘nice’ puts you at risk of the cobra effect where ‘nice’ behaviours are used for the wrong reasons.
From a financial perspective the time investment for an employee to become financially productive is much longer if you have to "teach smart”.
‘Nice’ and ‘Smart’ are subjective. What’s nice to a 41 year-old Caucasian manager might not be nice to a 21 year-old Asian intern. Here’s a wee infographic with just two opposing approaches on being ‘nice’ and their implications. There are many more ways this can be explored but we’ll keep it simple for this example.
For Job seekers:
This question is clearly a false dichotomy, to prompt your experience, opinion and problem-solving ability, so don’t dive in too deep to one option or another unless you truly feel that way.
Answer odd questions through stories if you’re stuck, interviewers want to hear examples of your values and principles.
There’s no ‘right’ answer, and as cliché as that sounds, if you conflict with the interviewer on a principle then it will save both parties time and money if you didn’t work there.
Just to explore this further, I tried the ‘nice or smart’ question in interviews, here’s some notes on how this played out in two different applications:
Middle Manager Application
I had someone applying for a middle management position, she was nervous until this question came along and it seemed to encourage her to be herself.
When I asked her, she said it was better to be both, and I pressed her further, thankfully she was honest and said she honestly hadn't thought about it before.
She paused, and came back and said it was better to be nicer than smart and went on to explain why she thought this, referring to examples of group work and how her impression was that ‘smart’ people sometimes just want to be heard but won’t necessarily do the work.
I sat, listened to her speak and could see she was speaking sincerely about why she thought this.
How she spoke and her articulation of her raw ideas told me volumes about her critical thinking, how she put her ideas together, how she tied her experiences with a consideration of smart vs. nice and vice versa. And lastly how she wanted to be treated and how she would treat others with her experiences.
I knew which team and supervisor she belonged with after listening to her (and of course with the culmination of other answers).
Creative Designer Application
The next was a creative looking for a new job and wanting to join the company so he could learn.
He didn't think twice about the question and said smarter than nice. I noted that he didn’t think before answering, but could see that he felt certain that this was the ‘right answer’, which also indicated his inability to see through the question and think why this question was asked.
I sat and listened to him speak, he had many reasons for this belief and finally concluded that it was smart to be nice.
This final conclusion gave us two potential indications about him, 1 - he could be the type to act nice for political gain, or 2 - that we wouldn't have to worry about this person being aggressive to get what he wanted.
Either way it gave us an indicator of what to watch for if we hired him.
Although this was an interesting experiment we decided not to ask ‘‘nice or smart?’" again and try asking different odd questions instead.
Asking odd questions allows us to see a person’s reasoning process and critical thinking, more importantly it helps us connect with them as humans and see who they really are. And even if we hire them despite receiving an undesirable response to the odd question, isn’t it our role as leaders to invest our efforts to support and guide them for mutual success?
