Click Your Fortune #2: Top interview question - Alessandro Centrone

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Click Your Fortune is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure style series that literally feeds questions from students to knowledgeable experts around the world. This intro video explains it all: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/click-your-fortune-episode-2

This episode features the professionals listed below answering dozens of questions submitted by students from all over the world. Got a burning question? A hero you'd like to see interviewed? A career you would like to see explored? Suggest and vote up ideas for future click your fortune videos here: [link to fortune episode one community page]

Adital Ela: Sustainability Designer
Sandra Aamodt: Neuroscientist; Author
John Werner: Leadership Team, Citizen Schools; Research Scientist, MIT
Alessandro Centrone: Vice President of Sales & Distribution, Steelcase Inc.

What's one interview question you ask every prospective employee?

I like to see how people think,

so very often I ask questions

that are inferential

so they are not really looking into the knowledge

because I know that someone may have done the research

and someone may not have done the research.

Although I can appreciate the enthusiasm and desire

that someone may show,

so I evaluate that.

I often ask questions like,

"How many golf balls do you have

in the United States?"

And I'm not looking for an answer

that tells me the exact answer,

but I want to know how they think.

And again, this goes to the idea

that we are moving to a world

where people don't care so much

about the product in itself.

Products are becoming more and more commodities.

But people care about our ability

to challenge their way of thinking.

They enjoy the fact that we are bringing something

to a conversation.

So, you want at the end of a meeting

with a C-level person

who has given you a half an hour, one hour of their time,

to make him feel like they didn't waste that hour with you,

but, I don't want to say that they learned something,

but they saw things with a different perspective.

So, I like young people

who can really put these thoughts together

and say, "Yes, I don't know the answer to that,

but this is how I get to an answer."

And I think very often that gives me a lot of ideas

whether or not that person will be able to master

some more sophisticated and complex thoughts and ideas

that we will feed them,

but they would be able to accept those ideas

and elaborate their own way of thinking

around those ideas.

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