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I am an IT professional, currently looking for new roles in IT. I recently went to an interview at an IT company, where the first question was: “Can you explain the Higgs Boson?” Not 100% off the wall as I have a PhD in physics, but still a “bad question”.
 
I carelessly attempted to answer this question (not sure anyone knows the answer which is why it was careless) – ended up rambling about associated bits of physics and I have to say felt I answered the question poorly.
 
Still, what happened in answering this question was I established a rapport with the interviewer. He continued to ask better, but still poor questions, but by then we had a rapport and along with the answers I could throw in more anecdotes and stories of how I have done more relevant stuff.
 
Outcome – invited back to a phase 2 interview with the CFO and was hugely put off by his interview technique – I believe I did reasonably well in this interview, but I simply could not see myself working alongside the CFO, so broke a rule and the very next day spoke with the recruitment consultant and rejected the job before it was offered to me.
 
Anyway – for the purposes of this forum – bad questions may not give you the chance to get facts across within the question, but they can be used to build a relationship, so they are in efficient, but not a total waste of time.
 
Listening to P1 of the podcast on this subject whilst writing this anecdote, it chimed with me, so I thought I would add it to the forum.