It's that time again! Time for our Interview Question of the Week. If you didn't get the chance to take a look at last week's question, you can find it here.
As you know, this is the time when we break down a tough interview question, tell you what traps to look out for and come up with a great strategy for answering it effectively.
So, here you have it, The Interview Question of the Week:
Question:
Tell me about your most boring job?
Why it is a a trap:
If you tell them a memorable story about a job you had that was very boring, you will be forever associated in their minds with the particular job.
The best answer:
If you tell them a less than memorable experience, it might be appropriate, but, depending on your storytelling skills, the interviewer might not find it as boring as you did and classify you as a complainer or someone who isn't easily satisfied.
On the other hand, you don't want to tell them too memorable of a story. For example, after high school, I attended a very old, prestigious and very expensive college for women. Because I was not weathly, like the majority of their current and previous students, I had to have a campus job to supplement my scholarship. My job was in the office that handled large monetary gifts, bequests and raising funds for the schools endowment. It was my assignment to dig through large boxes of paperwork that had been stored in several unused closets. The boxes were filled with unorganized documents, all of them having been there for 25 years or more. I would sift through them and find wills or other documents indicating a bequest to the school. Next, I would create a file with the benefactor's name on it and take steps to determine if the person was still alive. After that, I would try to find out what time frame they had attended the school and attempt to locate the appropriate yearbook to look them up. I would make a list of what activities they had been involved with, and I created a color coded system to tag their file so that the fund-raising office could better target these older, wealthy and often times shut-in alumnae. Occasionally, it would be necessary to contact the alumna directly in order to get additional information about their bequest and sometimes I would be asked to go visit them for tea in an attempt to make them feel good about the school and their donation. The job was very time consuming and tedious. My reward for finishing a box of paperwork was that I could spend a few days addressing envelopes instead of my normal duties.
If I were to tell an interviewer this story, odds are high that they would forever think of me as the person who asks old people for money. It would be easy to forget that I was dealing with large gifts made by extremely wealthy ladies and their families, and I certainly wouldn't want to be remembered as someone who tried to con little old ladies out of their social security checks.
The best answer is to say “I have been very fortunate to never have been bored at a job. Every job with a company is valuable and serves it's own purpose. I think that if you are bored, it means that you aren't being challenged and then it is up to you to find a way to challenge yourself and make your job more exciting.”
What do you think about this question? Are there other questions you would like to see answered here? Let me know in the comments.
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By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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