<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>What cereal are you? Job interview queries on Web</span>
Tue Apr 28, 2009 3:35am EDT
By <a href='http://blogs.reuters.com/search/journal ... .Wulfhorst' target='_blank'>Ellen Wulfhorst</a>
NEW YORK (Reuters) - When is it OK to lie? What would you do with 100 Christmas trees in July? If you were a cereal, what kind would you be?
Knowing that those and other questions await in an employment interview could have a huge impact on a candidate's chances of landing a new job and, beginning on Tuesday, a Web site called Glassdoor.com aims to provide that insight.
The online jobs site, which already lists salaries and reviews of companies around the world, is adding interview listings. Using a "give and get" system, users submit their experience anonymously for access to other people's stories.
"We view our mission as helping people make better career decisions," said Robert Hohman, chief executive of the Sausalito, California-based company.
"Interviewing is scary, and the one thing that can help reduce the anxiety of interviewing is information," he said. "It makes you feel more confident."
Reviews of nearly 2,000 job interviews have been collected from more than 1,000 companies, Hohman said.
The information includes descriptions of the process, such as whether it was a panel or one-on-one. It lists unexpected or tough questions, rates the difficulty, whether it was positive or negative and whether the interviewee got an offer.
For instance, a review by a candidate for a maintenance director post at a senior center run by Brookdale Senior Living in Tucson, Arizona, warned against the job.
The company lost his application, and an executive who scheduled an interview with him took that day off, he said.
"There is no leadership skills in this corp," he wrote, adding that he was asked: "What would the inside of my car look like if we were to go look inside of it right now?"
A Brookdale spokeswoman told Reuters the company was "disappointed" the applicant had an unpleasant experience and would use the review as feedback.
Launched 10 months ago, Glassdoor has about 200,000 salary listings and reviews of jobs at some 23,000 companies, and many companies use the information for feedback, Hohman said.
The interview information seemed like a good addition at a time when many people are battling for so few jobs, he said.
Some questions could be applied to almost any interview, such as the question about lying that was asked of a project manager applicant at Integer Group, a marketing agency.
The question about cereal was posed in an interview for a financial analyst at Cisco Systems, and the query about Christmas trees arose in a marketing interview at Visa Inc.
The companies with the most interview reviews are Microsoft, Apple and Google. The company with the easiest rating was Bank of America, Amazon scored the most difficult rating, PricewaterhouseCoopers got the highest positive rating and Google was rated the most negative interview experience, Glassdoor said.
(Editing by Michelle Nichols and Cynthia Osterman)
source: <a href='http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/ ... 28?sp=true' target='_blank'>http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/ ... sp=true</a>
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本篇导读改为归纳及引导提问形式
1. 古怪的问题在某些情况下可能更能诱导出应试者或者应聘者真实的一面？
2. 报道中描述的网站类似于国内的评师网、口碑网，通过网络聚集传统条件下分散的群体的能量以形成对等于能量集中的对应方群体，增加了信息和物质的多通道流动，并赋予弱势群体在博弈中更公平的力量。
3. 报道最后对几家公司的对比可能说明了什么？为何谷歌的负面评价较多？