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.