Another of those moronic interview tricks that wouldn’t work on me.
Interviews can be a daunting prospect, as candidates have a finite period of time to win over employers.
But no matter how long you have spent researching the company, nothing can prepare you for this sneaky interview trick bosses are using.
Your future and progression in your career field could all boil down to – no pun intended – a cup of coffee.
Xero Australia managing director Trent Innes, says the technique helps gauge employee’s ‘attitude’ and ‘ownership’ as he watches what they do with an empty coffee cup.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they want to see if you take it back to the kitchen, because this really tells them how well you can preform the role being interviewed for. Waste of time on me, because I don’t drink coffee and always refuse a drink of any kind in such a scenario.
When interviewing people for a role, you are looking for competence. This childish trick tells you nothing about competence, hence it is a pointless waste of time. I don’t care if someone doesn’t take their cup back to the kitchen, I care if they can do the job I’m paying them to do. When I interviewed candidates, I used my own assessment skills to make a reasoned decision about their ability to do the job and to fit in with the team. I didn’t need stupid games to do it, because I was a competent hiring manager. As a consequence, I employed some really gifted people and saw them outgrow the team and move onto better roles having blessed us with their talents while we had them. I still don’t know to this day whether they would have passed Trent Innes idiotic coffee cup trick and care even less, because I’m not a complete jerk.
Drastically, Trent claims he wouldn’t hire anyone who failed his ‘coffee cup test’, because he believes it tells more about a person than any question could.
In fact, he says that anyone who failed under his watch would be immediately blacklisted from the company, according to the Mirror.
Trent Innes is precisely the kind of tosser I’d walk a million miles in the opposite direction to avoid working for. His coffee cup trick tells us all we need to know about one person and it ain’t the interviewee.
So all he needs to do is give the candidate a cup of coffee, not bother asking any questions and bas his decision on if he takes the cup back to the kitchen?
That is an hour interview cut down to 5 minutes. Saves everyone’s time …
I wonder if the person that crashed Bud Light took their coffee cup back to the kitchen? That’s the kind of result that basing a hiring decision on if the person being interviewed even knew where the kitchen was.
Why would anyone expect the interviewee to return a cup to a kitchen in an office they are unfamiliar with? I’m happy to judge people who actually work there leaving cups etc scattered around the office for the cleaners to deal with but as the interviewer it is part of your (or a receptionists’) job to fetch the drink and then return the cup to the kitchen afterwards.
Precisely.
I’d treat it like I would my house with a guest. If I make someone a drink, I take the cup in the kitchen and wash it too.
If this tosser refused to employ me, I’d consider it a bullet dodged, as he is not the type of employer I would be looking for
Yup. He has exposed himself as a toxic employer. No reasonable person would want to work for him.