Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Lead Questions in Interview

This kind of questions are the traps which the interviewers lay in a very subtle manner. They already know, when asking the first question of the two question series, what a candidate is about to say. Then they perplex the candidate with a different, almost opposite question on the same subject immediately after. The second question is worded such that a candidate succumbs to pressure and happens to say a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to it and that is where the problem lies. Therefore, a candidate must guard himself properly from the trap laid by the interviewer by asking second or subsequent question on the same topic. He should try to gauge the real intention of the interviewer before answering the question.
Question : How do you feel about India going nuclear?
Answer : I can say, it was a good attempt on the part of the government under the dynamic leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee to go nuclear, so earlier the better. The example of China shows that we can save money by cutting down the size of our conventional forces and utilise it for other development purposes.
Question : But with Pakistan following India’s footprints soon after, India seem to have lost the advantage. Isn’t it?
Answer : That’s true.
Analysis : We can see in the above example that the answer of the candidate to the first question was quite on track, but he succumbed to the second question by saying a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Here, the candidate was expected to show his psychological and intelligence standard by analysing it in a proper way, but he exposed his shortcoming that he finds it utterely difficult to face newer situations which may arise all of a sudden. He should rather have paraphrased his reply something like this :
“You are right, sir, that India lost the initial advantage because of Pakistan following suit immediately after. But it has other implications too. Pakistan reacted to India’s explosions in almost no time. It proves only India’s stand that Pakistan was running a clandestine nuclear programme but befooling the world. Secondly, India can get along with the economic and other sanctions due to its size and resources, but it would be quite difficult for Pakistan to cope with these sanctions due to its over-spending on defence budget. It spends 7% of its GDP as against less than 3% of India.”

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