My top interview question
There’s one interview question I’ve found that is really insightful. It is a bit of a curve-ball and it stops candidates in their flow, perhaps confuses them, but definitely makes them think. It is “what brings you joy at work?”
Brene Brown in Atlas of the Heart defines joy as “an intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure and appreciation”, and that while experiencing joy we don’t lose ourselves, but rather we become more truly ourselves. She states that “joy at work is more important than happiness”: happiness is often measured as a trait rather than a state, and that it is fairly stable over time (what psychologists and philosophers refer to as eudaimonic happiness); however, joy is a deeper and more meaningful experience than happiness.
Paul Dolan, Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues in Happiness by Design that joy is an output of a production process, based on varying inputs. Those inputs are different stimuli, and the production process for joy involves where you place your attention in respect of those stimuli. Consider two types of stimuli, one is your favourite flavour of ice cream, the other is a parking ticket. Arguably, if you spend more time thinking about the ice cream you will feel joy, but if you focus more on the parking ticket you will feel miserable. Therefore, Dolan argues that you should spend more time on things that make you feel joy.
So I’ve found this question to be really insightful in so many ways. For a start, it’s a bit of a red flag if I ask a candidate this and (beyond an initial pause to consider) they struggle to answer the question. If you don’t find joy in what you do for work, why are you doing it? I’m not expecting every working moment to be a rapture, but I would be concerned if there wasn’t some pleasure gained from where you spend a large chunk of your waking life. This may point to a mismatch between career path and values or motivation. It’s a useful test to determine if the core responsibilities of the job are a good match: if the candidate finds joy in designing creatives for social media but the job requires extensive reporting writing it may not be.
In psychological research, it has been found that joy positively correlates with learning and growth, acquisition of wisdom, and productivity. And I think the reason behind this is best summed up by Anaïs Nin, in this quote from her diaries: “The secret of joy is the mastery of pain”. What this means is that to feel joy we must accept our struggles, and overcome them, in whatever form they take, be that work, financial or relationship shaped. We will not find joy if we never experience pain. It takes a degree of resilience and self awareness to accept our struggles and therefore to feel joy - and those are qualities that are hard to assess in candidates through interviews alone. Anyone can say what they want you to hear to a standard question like “tell me about a time you had to deal with conflict or failure”, but how they answer this simple question about joy reveals insight into their motivation, cognition and behaviours.
As well as understanding what people may find challenging or unenjoyable in the role (by either omission from answering what brings them joy, or indeed voluntarily offered as additional information in answering this question), identifying what they find joy in enables us to understand how they may handle stressful situations. If someone finds joy in organising, when a stressful event happens they will be the ones planning out how to tackle it; if they find joy in collaborating with others, they will be the person rallying the team when the chips are down; if someone likes deep independent work, they may seek out alone time and not ask for help.
To summarise then, how the candidate answers the question “what brings you joy at work?” will give reasonable indication of:
What they value and are motivated by
How they will handle stressful situations
What challenges them to learn and grow
