Employees, what is your superpower? (accountant, health insurance, bill, good)
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I haven't been asked that or seen it asked in an interview. I'm stumped to what useful information you could actually get from such a question. Of course, I feel that way about most of interview questions that aren't directly job or experience related. The "right" and "wrong" answers to such questions are completely up to the opinion of the interviewer.
Perhaps the best answer to that question is "I have the power to use stupid interview questions to determine who I don't want to work for." Of course, that answer wouldn't go over very well with anyone who would ask it.
I would never reveal my "superpower" to any current (because I still use it) or potential future employers.
My secret sauce superpower is the "fake it grand until you make it." I have faked my way through my entire career until I gained the knowledge somehow to successfully perform my duties.
From my first day on the job when I was handed a stack of green bar paper and told to reverse engineer it "Yes sir. Will get this done by Friday" (thumbed through it like it was just "a thing" and I had zero programming knowledge zero/nada - I had never seen anything like this before - went home and bawled my eyes out that nite - showed up the next day and saw an older gentlemen sitting alone at his desk to meet and greet for help and mentoring) events like that, that brought me to my current position today, I have faked the whole ride until I could somehow "do it."
I have faked everything, from the way I studied for advanced certifications (with songs and rap), sat with the smart people in my IT classes (we worked in teams, I got a 4.0 overall and I am intellectually challenged, almost brain dead, specially in IT), charmed folks into helping me and some unusual lucky breaks.
So....in my first rough year of faking it through my job, I was hired as a designer of accounting programs (I was told this was an accounting job by the man who hired me when I met him as a customer at my former job). One of the projects I was assigned was a tandem project with another experienced designer. We both had similar projects that did identical things but moved to different fields.
He knew I was as dumb as a box of rocks at the time and had no time to teach me, so he designed all the code for his and told me to update the code with the fields needed for mine and to pass it back. He would review it and then give it back to me to publish.
We had a meeting with the functional managers who were off site at the time (via conference call) and the whole team and upper management came in person. This was our pre design walk through and my first one.
Steve read through his logic table that he designed. But....he forgot to change the fields from mine back to his. The functional managers said "No. This can't be right. Those fields relate to the other program." Steve got nervous and stumbled and kept faltering so they had to drop him and move on to me. One of my skills is that I can read very well, so I picked up my program and read it, emphasizing fields and logic moves. The functional managers said "Perfect! Well done. This is the way we wanted it to work." I could hear one of the participants in the room whisper to someone else "He copied her program."
Two weeks later we had the final design walk through. Steve was out of town and he and his wife were stuck in the area because of a snowstorm and we were going to reschedule but I told my boss "Don't reschedule, I will take both projects (because they were already done and Steve corrected his part and all I had to do was read through the logic table). I took the meeting, took ownership of both projects and read and walked through them with the most confident voice I could muster and the functional managers applauded at the finished design.
That set the beginning of my reputation as a great designer (I never was, I never really learned to design, just kind of chucked my way after that, luckily moved to testing designs) that very meeting (a written comment was made in the meeting notes of my exceptional performance). I had no clue what I was doing, all I did was read - but it worked - much to my delight.
That was nothing but a total lucky break. I am telling you - fake it till you make it!
If I had ever been asked such a question, I'd either wonder if the interviewer was a marvel comic fan, watched too many movies of same, or was an idiot.
If I had ever been asked such a question, I'd either wonder if the interviewer was a marvel comic fan, watched too many movies of same, or was an idiot.
That's just a stupid question.
That's the problem with those questions. One person asks it, and it makes the person being interview feel intimidated like they were dealing with a wise person cause they don't know how to answer it, so they repeat that to others and it spreads like a virus. It takes more gumption to not go with the crowd and refuse to ask stupid questions like this. It's like that question, "What's the last book you've read?". It's a pointless question, but people continue to ask it because it gives them a little power trip as if this will help them peer into your soul and know everything about you. Some people with a 90 minute drive each way, 5 days a week don't have time to read much other than the bills and health insurance statements that come in the mail.
My superpower, useful in supporting the systems I work with, is making things work efficiently. Same thing with business processes, I can identify bottlenecks and propose solutions that work.
What do you do for work? I would like an idea of job titles and job descriptions that do this. Operations?
No, never have asked this, and as a hiring manager, likely never would. We generally ask situational/ behavioral questions with follow-ups.
Many years ago, i did ask a candidate what their greatest strength was (perhaps the same question, I guess), and they answered "time mangement". And this was a candidate that showed up 10 minutes late to the interview.
Well, he did get the interview all the while investing 10 minutes less in the process.
I haven't been asked that question *quite* that way, but I have been asked, "What can you do (workwise) that would surprise others?"
My answer is something along the lines of, "I'm sort of an idiot savant when it comes to finding a new way to get systems to do something." To explain, we might have a system that you are supposed to take steps A, B, C, D, and E to get it to do something. Inevitably, what happens is I forget the steps, and try to work it out....and my work arounds usually mean eliminating two or three of the steps, but still getting the desired result. I've had a couple of IT folk/programmers asking me how I did that, and I always have to tell them, "I didn't know I couldn't." (I'm not IT or coding or programming.) I couldn't tell you *how* I do it, I'm just trying to remember what I was taught, and end up re-inventing the wheel, so to speak.
I've actually had managers ask me to train other team members on how *I* do something, because it ends up being more efficient.
So yeah.....give me a new system to work on, and inevitably I'll probably accidentally find 'shortcuts' for procedures.
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