Although I felt as if I had way overprepared for the airline pilot interview, just like every other candidate who was sitting nervously with me in the waiting room, I was still steamrolled when it started. Certainly an airline wants, and has every right, to see how you will respond to stress.

They know that if you can’t handle a few hardball questions in the comfort of an office interview then they will doubt how you respond to a dangerous aircraft emergency during the middle of the night, at 35,000 feet, and over the dark and wintery wastes of the North Pacific Ocean.

There were two company individuals in the room to interview me—a check Captain and a Human Resources rep. The former was there to ask all the specific aircraft and technical questions as well as to get a feel if I could work as a team member in the cockpit over a multi-day trip—a time when fatigue can, or better said will, make even the best of us irritable. In turn, the Human Resources man was there to tease out all those details that HR reps so adroitly do… and it was he who went for the jugular.

Looking at an additional form I had to fill out as the interview started, he wanted to know why my handwriting was so bad. Why did I bring two logbooks to the interview when every other candidate had brought just one? When I explained that I had flown in Japan and assumed he would like to see the certificates and signatures he wanted to know, since he did not read Japanese, how in the world he could be assured that they were not fake? One sharp and brusk query followed another until, mercifully, the check captain started to weigh in with the technical questions—questions that usually are intimidating but in this case were a pure relief after the sandblasting from the HR rep.

A couple of years later I was in line at the pretzel stand at the airport when I recognized him in front of me. I introduced myself, thanked him for giving me the green light to be hired, but gently asked why he had been in such an attack dog mode. He laughed as if he had not a care in the world and explained that he employed a lot of different techniques to put stress on the candidates. He said that while he did not remember me, that he probably just determined, on that day and immediately upon my walking through door, to use that specific technique. He admitted that it did have the drawback of not being as consistent as other interviewing approaches but that he had, over the years, perfected it to be surprisingly accurate in predicting who would get hired and through training. Whew!

Since then I have enjoyed reading about what different industries look for in their candidates, how they conduct the interviews, and the questions they pose—some of which can be disarmingly simple. I have heard of a Michelin 3 Star chef asking a new assistant to make an omelet and a university physics department head asking a post-doc why the speed of light is what it is. An advanced diving coach recently told me that she was asked during a formal interview how she kept divers from hitting the board. All of these are seemingly super easy-peasy for the qualified candidate to answer but they are surprisingly revealing in how a candidate goes about his/her craft.

I am sure that you have read of the interview questions at places such as Google, Microsoft, and other tech firms. These queries range from the seriously scientifically rigorous (Think Poindexter here!), the practical such as why a manhole cover is round, to the more contemplative as how many gas stations you think are in your town and how you calculated it. What they are getting at of course is not so much what you think but rather how you think as George Orwell so famously put it.

The hard and cold reality though is that the real purpose of all those questions is not to see how far any one candidate is along his/her path of self-actualization, but rather if the person will be able to produce for the team/company/institution. The interviewer frankly does not care a whit where you or I wish to be in five years or what our hobbies are. But they are most keenly interested in discovering just how much work we can get done and if we can do it while getting along with others. Everything else is gravy.

Another type of interview that I enjoy is when an intelligent moderator/reporter sits down with an elite for a one-on-one. This elite might be an entertainer, business leader, politician, intellectual, or simply a person of note. In a way it does not matter as the setup is strikingly similar. Not always, but quite often, the questions have been screened and so any appearance of spontaneity is just that—an appearance.

Many of these individuals (especially the politicians and business leaders) live in an extremely scripted environment and have assistants to ensure that they will never be asked a question or presented with a situation that takes them completely off guard.

As an aside, I once saw a crack in this façade during the questioning of a 4 Star general. Someone asked a question that apparently the general had not been briefed for and he was livid as he muttered something angrily to his aide—a full Colonel. This in turn resulted in an audible gasp among the audience as they, rightfully so, wondered how a senior military leader would prosecute the nation’s wars if he could not handle an impromptu question. Would the enemy be so accommodating as to not ask him something hard?

Disclaimer: I am encouraged by the long-form structure of many podcasts that allow a host to chat with a guest for an hour or even two. Granted the elites usually do not grant this amount of time to an interviewer, but it is a step in the right direction to tease out real and meaningful thought.

There are two things that I really enjoy about the answers the elite give to questions. The first is that they answer them in a manner, as if what they are thinking is such an everyday part of life, that you and I as average folk probably would not. Second, I bask in the frequent sheer pretension of the answers. When asked what they are reading it is always something like D.N. Thackeray’s 4,500 page six volume work Post Westphalian Nation-State Structures, A.J.P Griffiths Romanian Steel Production from 1948 to 1965 (not a real works by the way in case you were stopping reading this to head over to Amazon to order them), or the poetry of a long since deceased Bolivian writer. They delight in drawing out a small point about a 1936 Berlin Philharmonic concert under the baton of Kurt Furtwängler or dropping in classical quotes from Ovid, Livy, Suetonius, Cicero, and the rest of the gang. The more recondite and distant the allusion the better!

While I realize there are tons of things that we can learn from our betters through their good recommendations, I know that during an interview the films they mention are not the ones that we often see, the music they express an appreciation for is not that which we hear, nor is their reading list filled with books that we frequently read. Since a good deal of this is scripted I wonder how long it takes for them to come up with these answers. Is some poor aide left to beavering away to find these arcane bon mots to keep the elite’s public persona going?

Geek that I am, I can’t seem to get my fill of these histrionic pretensions. These “poor” elites are between the rocks (of course the elites would instead use the phrase between Scylla and Charybdis) of trying to relate to us on a personal and human level but also, at the same time, to distance themselves from us and be at the van of cultural, political, and intellectual advancement—a breathtaking tight rope act to be sure.

Oh, by the way, why is a manhole cover round? Well, because it is the only shape that cannot fit back through the opening and thus will not fall in if turned on its edge. Be careful though if you decide to try this out—the covers are heavy!

Coming soon: A look at how the intellectual Max Weber, the actor Rock Hudson, and a number of my bosses through the years have commented on leadership. Also why I like the phrase “neutral buoyancy” to describe life.

What ho!