A 28-year-old CEO Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Shares his Favorite Question to Ask in a Job Interview

John: Good morning and welcome to another episode of Green Apple Slices. This is John Garrett coming to you. I’m so excited. It’s Thanksgiving in the U.S. week, so I might just eat turkey every day. I don’t even know if you can do that, but I’m here with Rachel Fisch. There’s the laughter.

Rachel, the Accountants Group Leader for Canada in Sage — blabbity blah blah, I said it all wrong again but whatever.

Rachel: I don’t that’s a new thing. I think it’s fine.

John: I’ve got Canada in there. That’s all that matters.

Rachel: Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

John: Exactly.

Rachel: We had our Thanksgiving like a month ago. We’re good. We’ve eaten lots of turkey.

John: I know. You’re from the future. You guys are like way ahead of everything. Every Monday we always get together and talk about an article that we found. I saw one on Business Insider, an article written by Catherine Rice. The line is “A 28-year-old CEO named to Forbes 30 Under 30 shares his favorite question to ask in a job interview.”

Rachel: Right.

John: Right. And I was like, wow, a 28-year-old CEO. I am a slacker.

Rachel: Well, no, as I read this and I go, I am so not a millennial.

John: Right. Right.

Rachel: I was reading this and I think that he likes to ask prospective employees an unusual question which is “Tell me about your soul,” and I don’t know what I would do. There are two kinds of people — people who are taken off guard by that and those people who have done soul searching and who know what he’s talking about and can kind of speak to that. I’m trying really not be cheeky here because we do have millennial CEOs. We need to work with people who are much younger and who have been maybe raised a little differently or whatever. I just think that there is value in having different types of people within an organization.

John: Sure.

Rachel: So when he’s talking about the people who kind of get what he’s getting at and can answer and the people who don’t, I actually think that it would be good for him to hire a few of the people who don’t get what he’s talking about because maybe they can bring to the organization a different perspective. Like when you think about driving a car, for example, you have drivers and you have navigators. You can’t fill a company with navigators, but you also can’t fill a company with people who want to drive.

John: Yes.

Rachel: It does need to be a combination of both to really do the strategic planning and what is it that we need to be accomplishing as an organization, and then those who are really going to take it out into the market and deliver and sell and those wonderful things. So I think that it really takes a blend of these really unique characteristics and these people who have very different skills and very different psychographics almost than it does to kind of fill your whole organization with a similar person especially like somebody like you because that’s what kind of what ended up being the downfall of Uber, right?

John: Right, yeah, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, absolutely.

Rachel: They were talking about how the CEO just continued to hire people very much like himself which ended up creating this huge monster of a toxic place to work for everybody else involved.

John: Right, right.

Rachel: Yeah. What do you think about it?

John: I do like the idea that it is a nonstandard question, and it’s a question that is not surface level. I do appreciate that because it’s not the standard what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Blabbity blah, whatever. It is kind of a curveball question, and it does kind of let you know will this person be able to handle adversity that comes at them because, yeah, I wasn’t ready for that question. Wow, okay. It also lets you know is this person somebody that is in tune with how their piece fits in to the universe as a whole, if you will, or into the company as a whole rather than doing just your task. It’s, hey, understand that I’ve got a bigger purpose here and what is that?

So I do kind of like it that way. But, certainly, you don’t want to hire all the people that give you just the exact right answers that are the same as yours.

Rachel: For sure.

John: But I do think that is a good question to ask or something along those lines because that one question alone would be the whole interview time. I mean it should lead to a full discussion type of a thing.

Rachel: Right.

John: So that being said, I thought that it was okay. It’s just be wary of the answers that you get and the people that you hire that are all the same like what you said. So absolutely. That only leads us to wrap it up with, Rachel, tell me about your soul. Just kidding, everybody. We’re out of time.

Rachel: This podcast is not long enough.

John: Right, right. That would be every episode from now until the end of the year, everybody. We’re going to talk about Rachel’s soul. So there we go. I don’t have one, so we can’t talk about mine. So it’s all good.

Rachel: Nice way to get out of that one.

John: Yeah. So there we go, everybody. Have a good rest of the week. Check us out at greenapplepodcast.com. If you would like to read the article, there’s a link there or on Twitter @GreenApplePod or Rachel’s @FischBooks or I’m @RecoveringCPA. Yeah, have a great rest of the week, Rachel.

Rachel: Also, you too. Happy Thanksgiving.