As employers ask job applicants for facebook passwords, have interviews gone crazy?

Reports of potential employers asking job applicants for access to their facebook accounts has caused much debate over privacy...

MARK SUMMERS SAYS…

Irritating interviewers need to get a life.

About a decade ago, working as an English teacher in Japan, I happened to ask a fellow recruit on our international programme about what kind of questions he’d had to field in the selection interview.

His answer left my gob well and truly smacked.

While making all the right noises about how working hard was enough to get us Brits on the plane to Tokyo, it seems things for some of the US recruits were a bit more taxing.

Like the shy young applicant who’d entered the interview room only to be greeted by his three interviewers standing on a table, shouting their heads off, and throwing crumpled up bits of paper at him.

The idea was that if he took charge of this stressful situation, he was ready to face an unruly classroom. Oh dear.

It seems things have only got worse in the intervening years, as employers copy Apprentice star Donald Trump (right) and dispense with standard interview practice in favour of rude hectoring, or posing smug puzzles which have no real answer, or relation to the job in hand.

Now some firms are asking for candidates to furnish them with their facebook password. That’s not on. The next time an interviewer sets you a philosophical conundrum more suited to a Buddhist monastery than a position in sales, treat them to the sound of one hand slapping.

DUNCAN HARE SAYS…

Weird ways sort the best from the rest.

In today’s dog-eat-dog working environment, the biggest advantage you can possibly have is being able to think on your feet.

That’s why the graduate in the US who printed his CV on a T-shirt and sent it to a top clothing company got the job ahead of those who applied on two pages of A4.

A favourite question of sales interviewers is something along the lines of ‘sell me an invisible pen’.

After the candidate’s spouted all manner and means why said product should be purchased, the interviewer hits them with ‘And what colour does it come in?’

The correct answer, of course, being ‘What colour would you like it in?’

Questions like ‘If you were a brick in a wall, which brick would you be and why?’ are designed to see how sharply you can tackle a problem.

Way more insightful than ‘Why do you want this job?’

There’s been a huge furore about job interviewers asking candidates for facebook passwords but in my book, they’re well within their rights.

Can you really blame a potential employer for worrying some muppet pictured with a traffic cone on their head might not be the right person?

Firms want people who are smart – and the weirder the interview question, the smarter the answer. Now, tell me, how would you sell sand castles to the UAE?

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