Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change

CHAPTER 10

THE EDISON TEST

Interview Questions

THE QUESTIONS MOST OF US know best but fear most are the questions that take place in the job interview. Whether you’re on the receiving end—trying to get the job—or on the giving end—trying to fill the job—the questions that get asked and answered here have real and immediate consequence. As a candidate, if you botch the answer to an important question, you don’t get hired. If you’re the boss and you fail to ask the right questions, you can miss a critical piece of information and hire the wrong person.

?

Successful job interviews revolve around a coherent set of questions that assess talent and accomplishment, examine judgment and values, consider success and failure, sample personality, and explore compatibility. Some of the questions are straightforward. Those are the fastballs. They come right across the plate and ask directly about previous experience or skills. Others are more unpredictable. They are the curveballs. They can come out of nowhere and test your reflexes and imagination. They may ask about something seemingly unrelated or frivolous. Either way, when you hit one out of the park, everyone cheers.

The first rule of the job interview: Don’t wing it. Preparation pays. Know what you’re talking about and to whom. Know as much as possible about the job. Have a list of questions on a pad and in your head. Think about where you’re going in the conversation, what you want to find out, and how you want to get there. Just as you wouldn’t sail across the Atlantic without GPS, you don’t approach a job interview without strategy and structure. You are not sitting down for a random chat. You are trying to learn as much about the other person as you can to establish whether this position is fit for both of you.

If you’re the applicant, you can anticipate that most every interview will ask you touchstone questions about your background, your professional experience, your interests, and what you bring to the table.

Why are you interested in this position?

What do you think you can do for us?

What makes you qualified and unique?

Why should we hire you?

Prepare a series of responses for each question. Organize your thoughts in bullet points, two or three distinct characteristics for each response, so you can talk about several traits without getting lost or long-winded. Practice your answers. You want to be clear and concise, prepared to address the question—or a variation of it—directly and confidently. Think of some examples or short stories that highlight relevant experience or set you apart. If you led a group of people to China to study architectural design and energy efficiency, you can talk about the new materials and technologies you saw and the discussion you had about China’s changing culture of innovation. If you ran a summer camp and had to deal with screaming kids and demanding parents, you can talk about the lessons of human nature that you so ably put to use to keep everyone happy.

Keep in mind that to the astute interviewer, your tone will convey as much about you as the words you use, so strike a balance in how you present yourself. Talk about your successes without bragging, express confidence without sounding cocky, acknowledge your shortcomings without sounding insecure. Be prepared to speak about your character and personality by citing a tough decision or a dilemma you faced and how you worked your way through it. Know what questions you want to ask. The questions that you, the candidate, will ask are nearly as important as your answers to the interviewer’s questions. You need to project informed curiosity about the position, the enterprise, the competitive landscape, and the measures of success.

You’ve been hiring a lot of people lately. What’s driving your growth?

How has your digital strategy affected your retail strategy?

How do your employees translate the corporate social responsibility you promote into their own work lives?

How are you doing with your questions and your answers? The best way to know is to listen to yourself. So try practicing by recording your answers on your smartphone. Do one answer at a time. Take it from someone who has done TV all his life—watching and listening to yourself is a sobering experience! You’ll be your harshest critic, but the experience will allow you to modulate your voice and fine-tune your answers so you project confidence and fluency.

If you’re the interviewer, you hope your candidates have practiced their responses. You want them to impress you, to talk about their strengths and why they’re the perfect fit for the job you’re filling. So you have to ask precisely and persistently to get beyond the résumé and practiced responses. Tailor the questions to the candidate and the job. If you’re filling a management position, ask about how your applicant deals with people, motivates success, and handles setbacks. If the job requires physical endurance, ask about similar work the candidate has done and how he stayed healthy. You are asking questions that call for tangible answers that shed light on your applicant’s talent, experience, and personality. You want to get a sense of what will motivate her and keep her productive. You ask about situations or experiences that illuminate intangible characteristics, such as how the person deals with adversity or thinks creatively. You want insight into the other person’s work ethic and professional expectations, goals, and ambitions.

What’s the most successful project you’ve run?

What is it about this job that interests you most?

How does this job connect with your larger professional aspirations?

Both the interviewer and the interviewee have an interest in clarifying the expectations of the workplace and establishing the qualities that each party brings to the relationship. Both try to dig out information by using direct lines of inquiry and by listening to words and tone. Both are asking themselves:

Will this be a good fit?

Do our skills and interests align?

Do we want the same things?

Are we compatible?

Job interview questions that look for compatibility come in some basic shapes and sizes. They ask you to:

Introduce yourself. These questions ask who you are, what you’ve accomplished, what you’ve learned. They ask about background and qualifications, where you’ve been, and where you’re going. They reveal what makes you unique.

Share your vision. Imagine that you are already on the job and part of the team. Take a situation, an opportunity, or a crisis and say how you would meet it. What risks would you take? Apply your past experience and knowledge to the new and imagined challenge.

Acknowledge setbacks and challenges. These questions go to the hard things in life—the really tough decisions, the failures, and the conflicts. This line of inquiry explores the human story and the adversity that calls for ingenuity, fortitude, and resilience.

Swing at the curveball. Think fast! These out-of-the blue questions test spontaneity and creative thought. They push people out of their prepared responses to get to the unvarnished and the genuine. Be creative. Be genuine. Have some fun.

Hunting the Best Heads

To get an inside perspective on the questions that job interviewers value most, I called Shelly Storbeck, managing partner of Storbeck/Pimentel and Associates, an executive search firm that specializes in higher education and nonprofit recruitment. I’d met Shelly years before when I was a candidate in a search. She is a keen judge of character and a realist about what it takes to be a leader in academia, where every stakeholder needs to be heard. Change is difficult when tenured faculty, defiant students, helicopter parents, and tradition-loving alumni have a say. There can be as many constituencies on campus as there are in a good-sized city.

Shelly leads her candidates through multiple rounds of interviewing, questioning, and probing in the first screening before recommending them to the next phases of the hunt. Then search committees, senior administrators, faculty, students, and staff submit applicants to days of questioning to determine if they have the vision and fit the institution intellectually, professionally, and emotionally.

In her interviewing, Shelly cuts right to the chase. If it’s a presidential search, she asks the candidate to talk about his or her experience pursuing presidential goals—fundraising, governance, enrollment, raising academic quality. She asks for specifics. If increasing diversity is a priority, for example, she asks:

How have you pursued diversity?

Who and how many diverse candidates have you actually hired?

How did you get robust candidate pools?

How did you mentor the people you brought on board?

To tap into a candidate’s vision, Shelly asks what she calls “magic wand” questions to draw out the big ideas that leadership confers—potentially game-changing ideas that can bend an institution’s trajectory and change its culture.

If you had a magic wand here, what would you do with it?

How would you work with different constituencies?

What is your ambition for this institution and how would you achieve it?

The magic wand invites the user to skip over politics and bureaucracy and think creatively.

If red flags have come up through reference checks, Shelly asks about those, too. She asks artfully, seeking candor and reflection rather than defensiveness or evasion. Knowing that everyone on a university or college campus has an opinion and just about every leader gets criticized by someone, she might ask:

What would your detractors say about you?

A self-aggrandizing answer masquerading as self-criticism doesn’t cut it. “I work too hard and people don’t like it when I send out emails at 3 a.m.” is not what she’s looking for. She wants honesty and realism; she listens for a thoughtful response that suggests the candidate is aware of her foibles and cares about how they play with the people around her. She considers this essential because the complexity of an executive’s job requires a tapestry of relationships to build consensus.

“Self-awareness is essential to being a successful leader,” Shelly explained to me.

Look Back, Look Ahead

Job interview questions fall into two constructs: what you have done and what you will do. The first kind, behavioral questions, ask a candidate to look back on what he or she has accomplished, achieved, or attempted. These questions dig into the lessons that time and experience have imparted.

Can you provide an example of when you set a goal and a timetable and achieved them?

Give me an example of how you responded when your boss asked you for advice or asked you to do something that you disagreed with.

What’s the hardest decision you’ve had to make at work, and how did you go about it?

These questions help shed light on how a job candidate has behaved under specific circumstances. They probe for details. But more than merely revisiting the past, they explore dilemmas and decisions that reveal ethics and values. The ways a candidate confronted a difficult challenge or dealt with a setback indicates how she might deal with problems in the new job.

Because past performance does not necessarily predict future results, good interviews also include situational questions. These future-oriented questions seek to reveal how a candidate would look forward and respond to a potential decision or situation. The best questions combine the particulars of a situation with a challenging choice.

Suppose your company had a very good year. You’ve been asked how the additional profits should be spent. What would you recommend?

If you were told that all departments had to cut 5 percent in spending and you were responsible for the budget, how would you decide where to cut?

A coworker tells you that she thinks she is not being paid fairly, that other people at about the same level of work are making more than she is. Now what?

There is a project the boss believes in passionately but that you think is ill-advised and may even get the company in trouble. You have a meeting to discuss it. What do you say?

These questions help establish quality of character and how candidates can imagine their way through adversity. They ask the candidate to connect aspirations and thought process to illuminate how he or she would draw on experience, logic, integrity, and understanding of the issues to make a decision.

Finding Innovation

Interviews for management and creative jobs ask how you will imagine, lead, or innovate. It seems that every company trumpets innovation these days, so how does an interviewer bring out innovation in an applicant? How does the successful applicant answer such questions?

I thought Jean Case would be a good person to consult. She and her husband, Steve Case, helped ignite the technology revolution back in the 1990s when Steve cofounded America Online. Back then, we ponderously referred to the internet as the World Wide Web. AOL brought it into just about everyone’s home. The company became synonymous with the emerging new world of digital communication and connection. Jean was a senior executive and helped make AOL one of the world’s most recognized and transformational companies.

In the late 1990s, as AOL approached its zenith, Steve and Jean Case created the Case Foundation. I first met them when AOL bought Time Warner, which owned CNN. The merger proved to be a disaster, but the Case Foundation, run by Jean, lives on, bringing people and technology together with philanthropy and business to push for social change. The Case Foundation sees itself as a convener of innovators. I wanted to know how the Cases found the people to do the work and inspire the change they sought. What did they ask in order to assemble a creative, original, technologically dexterous team?

I met Jean for lunch at a cramped but trendy seafood place in Washington. She arrived practically at a run, with a big, broad smile and a whoosh of energy, one hand clutching her smartphone, the other outstretched in greeting. She dove into conversation.

I expected her to be data- and metrics-driven, with a predetermined list of questions that probed the applicants’ experience, asked about what they had invented, and tested their technological competence. I was wrong. Jean wants to learn as much about how people think as what they think and know.

Jean is impatient. You see that instantly. She speaks fast and about big ideas. She is active in many causes—from planetary health to brain health. She’s served on school boards and presidential commissions. She doesn’t have time to waste. So when she asks questions of a job candidate, she expects precision and speed. She wants to know if the candidate has done his homework and has something original to say. She asks:

What have we gotten right?

What haven’t we gotten right?

What’s missing?

If you were sitting in my chair, what would you have done?

She asks about decisions the candidate has made or actions he has taken that are out of the ordinary. She is listening for answers that indicate the candidate can think fast and pivot when an opportunity or a setback changes the equation. She’s looking for risk takers.

How comfortable are you with unplanned surprises that come along?

Are you bold enough to put on the table an idea that’s fearless when you don’t have the data to know it will work?

Can you make a compelling case as to why you should try it?

These are Jean’s fastball questions. They test the candidate’s thought process and ask for logic and imagination about an unfamiliar situation or scenario. Jean’s fastballs reflect real-world concerns and dilemmas—a business decision, a personnel issue, an investment opportunity, a technology play—that relate directly to the candidate’s experiences and aspirations.

If you get the opportunity, how will you solve the problem?

How will you be smarter and stronger if it works?

How will you learn from it if it doesn’t work?

Like Shelly Storbeck, Jean asks about a candidate’s setbacks and shortcomings. She wants to hear how he discusses adversity or a particular challenge that didn’t turn out perfectly. She wants to hear how he dealt with disappointment or rallied when the team did not perform well. She asks the question bluntly:

What’s been your worst failure?

“It’s amazing how many people want to hide from that question,” Jean tells me, explaining that she views failure, dealt with wisely and described sincerely, as an asset. In the right context, failure represents a willingness to try something new and untested. Every applicant, Jean believes, should come prepared to talk about a failure.

What did you learn from it?

Fastball questions can be highly effective in job interviews, but they also work in other contexts. As an interviewer, I ask this type of question a lot—whether I’m speaking with a mayor, a mother, a CEO, or a teacher—because I want to know how people think and handle crises. As Shelly Storbeck observed, the right questions prompt candidates to provide lessons from their own narrative.

Be Ready for the Curveball

Pitchers can’t live by fastballs alone, and the same applies in interviews and job talks. When I interview candidates (for jobs or for politics) I like to throw curveballs too, to shake things up and test the candidate’s spontaneity. Curveball questions can come out of the blue—an unexpected topic or sudden shift. Serious or funny, curveballs should be different from your run-of-the-mill interview questions. They are looking for an unrehearsed response, a little humor, or some humanizing insight into the candidate’s personality and thought process.

In newsmaker interviews, I throw curveballs for similar effect. I remember an interview I was doing at The George Washington University with Michael Hayden, the former CIA director and retired four-star Air Force general. We were talking about desperately serious things—terrorism, cyberattacks, and rising threats from China and Russia. It was fascinating and it was important. But I also wanted the audience to get to know Hayden as a human being, to have a sense of how he thought, decided, and relaxed. I knew Hayden had a dry sense of humor, so partway through the discussion I paused, turned to the audience, and noted that even CIA directors get time off. He was the nation’s top spook. I asked:

Spy movies … TV shows. What do you watch?

Hayden lit up. “Homeland,” he replied with a smile. The show revolves around a bipolar CIA operative, Carrie Mathison, alternately brilliant and unhinged. Hayden knew people in the CIA just like that, he said. He worked right alongside them. He went on to talk about life inside the CIA and how he managed the pressures of that intense 24/7 job with the normal life that no one much thought about. For just a few minutes, the conversation came back down to earth. Hayden was funny and approachable. My question wasn’t brilliant, just a little different, an intentional pause in the intense discussion we’d been having, an effort to let the conversation—and the guest—breathe.

Curveball questions are often a part of job interviews. Jean Case told me she throws curveballs to see how people react and whether they can answer spontaneously and creatively. “We want to see how they respond when we ask them very nonobvious and unexpected kinds of things,” she said. Since originality and creativity are attributes she seeks in her applicants, she pays special attention to the answers. One of her favorite questions is:

What’s your favorite aisle at the grocery store?

I thought about her supermarket question and how I’d answer it personally. Maybe I’d go for the coffee aisle. The shelves show how deliciously diverse the world is, from Ethiopian Yergacheffe to Two Volcanoes Guatemalan. It’s an aromatic reminder that each day should start with a flavorful celebration. There’s evidence of human inventiveness and innovation—drip and espresso and single cup—amid the complexity of globalization and the challenges of human labor. The rise of organic and fair market coffees suggests that change is possible and prosperity can be shared. Coffee, you might say, is a metaphor for our times.

Don’t know if it would get me Case’s job, but maybe I’d qualify to be a barista somewhere.

The Candid Candidate

Job interviews often happen in intimidating or artificial surroundings—in front of a search committee or in a paneled office. The best candidates come confident and well prepared. Having practiced their answers and anticipated the questions, they walk in with their brains crammed with carefully crafted responses. It’s understandable. But the most fruitful interview ends with a genuine sense of the real candidate, not the one projected in the perfectly planned out answers.

No one is better rehearsed than political candidates running for office. Interviews with political candidates are simply public job interviews.

Why do you want this job?

What have you done to deserve it?

What will you do if you get it?

The most public job interview of all, the U.S. presidential debate, puts the candidates side by side, with a bunch of cameras recording every moment. While no reasonable employer would ask applicants to submit themselves to a routine like this, these debates offer some interesting lessons to consider. The most important one: Candidates want to stay on message. They ignore questions they don’t like. They say what they think people want to hear. So the interviewer should know it may take two or three swipes at a topic to pry loose an answer to the question at hand.

I decided to visit Bob Schieffer, someone who spent years trying to cut through canned responses for a living. He worked for CBS News for nearly half a century and hosted the network’s Sunday interview program, Face the Nation, for fourteen years. He moderated three presidential debates—Bush-Kerry in 2004, Obama-McCain in 2008, and Obama-Romney in 2012.

Imperturbable, with a good-old-boy southern smooth about him, Schieffer was one of the most dedicated, straight-shooting journalists of his time. His goal in the debate-as-job-interview was to get candidates to offer some insight on how they’d handle the job, the decisions they’d make, and the character they’d bring to it. Schieffer had years of practice interviewing people who were frustratingly disciplined at staying on message, sometimes ignoring questions entirely in order to say what they wanted to say. His challenge was to get his guests to do more than rehash their focus group–tested talking points.

Schieffer’s advice to candidates and questioners alike: be direct and be yourself. Be genuine. A highly effective interviewer, Schieffer was always known for his straightforward, conversational style. He never projected the self-important, smart guy approach that typified many pundits and talk-show hosts. In his debate questions, Schieffer tried for a more three-dimensional view of the candidates by mixing topics and alternating questions about policy.

He recalled one exchange in 2004, when George W. Bush was running for reelection against challenger John Kerry. The country was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Schieffer asked Bush a question of faith.

“Mr. President … you were asked … after the invasion of Iraq if you had checked with your dad. And I believe you said you had checked with a higher authority,” Schieffer said. “What part does your faith play on your policy decisions?”

Schieffer knew Bush often invoked his religious faith and that faith was an important part of life for millions of Americans. It was also part of Bush’s personal narrative of redemption. Schieffer also knew the stories suggesting that Bush went to war in Iraq to settle an old score for his father, who cast a daunting shadow over the Bush boys. Schieffer touched three live wires—faith, family, and war—and stepped back to see what would happen.

Bush didn’t give away the store, but his answer provided some texture and insight into how he thought and how his faith sustained him. Yes, he said, faith played a “big part” in his life, and he prayed a lot:

“I pray for wisdom. I pray for our troops in harm’s way. I pray for my family. I pray for my little girls. But I’m mindful in a free society that people can worship if they want to or not. You’re equally an American if you choose to worship an Almighty and if you choose not to. If you’re a Christian, Jew, or Muslim you’re equally an American. The great thing about America is the right to worship the way you see fit.”

He didn’t duck the question.

“Prayer and religion sustain me,” Bush said. “I receive calmness in the storms of the presidency … I never want to impose my religion on anybody else. But when I make decisions I stand on principle. And the principles are derived from who I am.”

Schieffer could have pressed harder. He could have followed up. But whatever a viewer thought of Bush or religion and prayer, Schieffer’s question offered Bush an opportunity to talk about an important aspect of his life. I don’t recommend asking a question about faith in a job interview unless you want your friends in HR all over you. But in presidential politics all is fair game, and Schieffer’s question brought together the personal, the professional, and the provocative to ask about philosophy and motivation.

History will determine George W. Bush’s stature among presidents. The public will decide whether it hired the right man at the right time. But in that moment, in front of a search committee of more than 50 million viewers, whether they liked the response or not, the public got a sense of Bush’s attitude toward faith and how he explained its role in his decision making. It wasn’t ground-breaking but it provided texture, and in the context of the presidential job interview, texture adds interest and insight.

If you want to know what drives your candidate, you can fashion a question that explores similarly complex terrain. Connect a decision to principles and values. Ask in a curious but matter-of-fact way. Know why you’re asking, and what you’re listening for.

Asking for the Team

Active listening drives good job interviews. It focuses in on compatibility markers such as complementary experience, shared interests, interpersonal skills, integrity, work ethic and a sense of professional mission. Experienced job interviewers listen for experience that corresponds to the job. They listen for insight into personality traits—energy, creativity, imagination, humor, risk tolerance—that align with the culture of the place.

For Jim Davis, CEO of New Balance, much revolves around teamwork. Jim has been an athlete all his life and is a naturally competitive guy. When he bought New Balance in 1972, it employed six people and was making thirty pairs of shoes a day. When we spoke, New Balance employed more than 6,000 people worldwide and was a $4 billion enterprise doing business in 140 countries. It still made its shoes in America.

Jim told me that he was always more of a listener than a talker. He shunned the spotlight. But he knew what he wanted and where he was going. Focused and confident, he explained that he built his business over the years by assembling a team he trusts. He believes that “the team” is a company’s most important asset, and he approaches his recruiting like the general manager of a major league franchise. He looks for exceptional talent but thinks about where and how he needs it and the effect it will have on the overall effort. He asks candidates directly how they function in a team environment.

How have you applied that approach?

How have you worked within a group to solve problems?

If a candidate shows too much ego or doesn’t sound like a team player, Jim told me, “We pass.” He listens intently for pronouns. He wants to hear “we,” not “I.” It is an indicator, he’s discovered over the years, of an approach as well as an attitude. “You can’t do things yourself,” he explained to me. “You can’t do anything sustainable yourself.”

Jim raised an important point in his pronoun patrol. The distinction between “I” and “we” is real. Individual initiative and accomplishment are important. They represent a track record and help answer the what-will-you-do-for-us question. But “we” sends a powerful signal, too, showing awareness of the team and a willingness to share the glory. It conveys inclusiveness, concern, and respect for the group and a generosity of spirit that can inspire others. Who wouldn’t want a person like that on the team?

Interview the Interviewer

When I interview job applicants, I learn a lot about them from the questions they ask of me. Some of the most important questions in a job interview come from that other side of the table. Curiosity and compatibility are mutual. These questions reveal whether a candidate has done his homework, how deep down he has drilled, and what his priorities and interests are. If a candidate starts with questions about pay, benefits, or vacation, he conveys a lack of interest in the job itself. Shelly Storbeck, the executive headhunter, told me that the most effective candidate questions reflect a sophisticated curiosity and passion for the job.

What are your traditions and what is sacred?

What will be the hardest things to change?

Cindy Holland, head of content acquisition at Netflix, helped revolutionize the way the world consumes media. She’s responsible for shows that millions of people around the world binge-watch—shows like Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, and Narcos. Holland was profiled in the New York Times Corner Office column for her accomplishments and management style. Always looking for independent, creative thinkers—the kind of people who will help Netflix find the next big hit—Holland sometimes starts by turning the tables in the opening scene, starting with:

What questions do you have for me?

Holland told the Times she wants to know that job candidates have done their homework, have passion, and are curious. “I want to know what they’re interested in and where they come from and what they’re seeking to do.” She listens closely and judges quickly: “Some people respond well to that first question and some people are so thrown that they say they don’t have any questions. It doesn’t disqualify them automatically, but it definitely tells me something about them.”

Jean Case believes that candidates demonstrate confidence and courage in the questions they ask. She told me about one candidate who pushed so hard and asked so many insistent questions about the Case Foundation that it made her uncomfortable. “She was challenging me,” said Case. “There was one part of me that hated it and another part of me that said, ‘Oh, she is so right for this organization.’”

Do you know when you have impact?

How are you sure?

What’s the discipline you use to know the value of what you’ve done?

The candidate insistently asked about one of the toughest issues a foundation faces. Those questions led to a long conversation about metrics, accountability, and impact. The candidate got the job.

Jean counsels business students to “be fearless” in their job interviews and ask if they’ll have creative running room.

What freedom do I have to step outside the defined role?

How much do you want to hear from me when I am not asked?

What impact do you want to have in the world?

Where does that stand as a priority in your business plan?

I once sent a student to speak to an accomplished friend who was running an exciting startup and looking for promising young talent. The student had done well in class and I thought the two of them might hit it off. About a week after they met, I reached out to my friend to see how things went.

“To be completely honest, it was bad,” he said. “The student was nice, but she had no idea who she was talking to or what we were trying to do here.” She seemed unaware of my friend’s contributions to the field. She never asked how he was applying his experiences or where he wanted to take the business. She did not get the job.

Good job candidates ask serious questions that reflect deep preparation, a grasp of the organization, and a genuine desire for the job. Candidates should study up on the business and its competitive environment. Know about the top people as well as your prospective boss and the interviewer. Ask about the specifics of the job, organizational goals, past experience, and current prospects. Demonstrate informed curiosity about the challenges, opportunities, and culture of the place. What you ask, and how you ask it, projects your knowledge, interest, and engagement. Write down ten smart questions and be prepared to ask them. Make some of the questions open-ended and some very specific. Role-play the likely answers and have some follow-on questions.

You took a hit from the competition last year. How are you dealing with that?

I know there’s been a big shift to online. How has that changed the culture of the place?

Where do you see the biggest challenges and opportunities in the next five years?

Bright Ideas

Job interviews have evolved. In the 1920s, Thomas Edison found himself inundated with job applicants. Being the inventive guy he was, Edison created a test with 141 questions to help him choose the best candidates. They went from the simple to the scientific:

What countries bound France?

How fast does sound travel per foot per second?

Name three principal acids.

Ninety percent of the job applicants failed. The questionnaire prompted an uproar. “Edison Questions Stir Up a Storm,” read a headline in the New York Times on May 11, 1921. “Victims of Test Say Only a Walking Encyclopedia Could Answer Questionnaire.” Still, there’s little doubt that the test winnowed down the number of candidates.

The job interview has progressed since Edison’s day. Now companies use sophisticated “predictive analytics” to measure responses against likely outcomes to forecast retention, learning capacity, leadership potential, and the ability to innovate and make effective decisions. Some companies require candidates to record Skype statements. But determining compatibility—finding Jim Davis’s team chemistry—still depends on human interaction, and that’s driven by the questions that get asked.

Want some practice? You might try the questions at the online dating site eHarmony. Seriously. These questions represent a sort of job interview for romance. More than 100 questions seek insight and reflection on basic traits and hidden quirks.

What adjectives describe you?

How do you rate your emotions?

Do you feel better when you’re around other people?

I’m not recommending hiring by way of online dating. But these compatibility questions, which ask who you are, where you’re headed, and how you describe yourself, are designed to prompt the lovelorn to articulate what they’re all about. They’re great practice for a job interview!

Here’s one everyone should answer:

Do you ask questions when you are in search of information?