How To Handle Job Interviews Like Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs is an investment bank that has been in existence for 150 years. That makes it fairly safe to say that the company has found a way to succeed and thrive.

One of the most important tools in building a company is the employees that you hire. A company with the right employees can succeed. A company with the wrong employees is doomed to fail. When it comes to finding the right employees, that can be equal parts art and science. Most everyone has been on at least one side of the desk in a job interview. Many of us have been on both sides. We know what it’s like to be the interviewer and the interviewee.

Most recovery agencies don’t have a human resources department. There isn’t someone who specializes in identifying and hiring the right employees. It often falls on the owner or someone that the owner has deputized to make that decision.

Being able to identify the right candidate during a job interview is never easy. And part of that reason is the questions that are asked are usually not the right questions. Before anyone is interviewed, the person in charge of hiring has to identify the skills or qualities that are being sought and design questions that help identify whether the candidates have those traits.

Some of the questions that Goldman Sachs uses during its job interviews have recently been made public and they are eye-opening. It’s clear that Goldman is looking for individuals who are creative, clever, and able to think on their feet. Here are some of the questions that interviewers ask candidates who want to work at Goldman Sachs:

• How many square feet of pizza is eaten in the U.S. every year?
• You have eight similar-looking balls. One of the balls weighs slightly more than the rest. Using a scale, how many balls do you have to weigh before you identify the heavier one?
• If you were asked to move a building from one side of a river to the other, how would you do it?
• Name a current issue in the news that will affect business at Goldman.
• If you asked your honest friends to tell me one good thing and one bad thing about you, what would they say?
• What frustrates you?

As you can see, these questions have very little to do with what employees at an investment bank will do during their day-to-day work. Instead, the questions are meant to see how people solve problems, manage projects, think creatively, and articulate themselves. And for a company that has been around for 150 years, copying the way that they hire new employees might not be the worst strategy in the world.