Heineken’s video advertisement on how to conduct an interview has already been seen over 13,000 times on YouTube. The video’s setting is in an office during a job interview. Suddenly, the interviewee is being asked a serious of standard questions one after the other.
The interviewees are feeling a bit uncomfortable as s/he is in a state of confusion of where this interview is really going. Then faced with a crisis, they are left to their own wits for some time before they are finally let in on the prank.
From a marketing perspective the commercial is brilliant, but how does this extreme interview style match up as an approach to recruiting employees? Does this prank qualify as a fair interview question, or is this type of interview too unconventional and borderline non-professional?
On the one hand, it’s important for a recruiter to have a sense of how an employee can handle stressful situations that unexpectedly come up in the work place. In this respect, the prank functions as an actual test of a person’s wits under pressure, which is something that could be hard to ascertain through standard interview questions. But still, this interview style may leave a lot of people uneasy, as it can be wrong to intentionally mislead an interviewee just to gauge their response. It may even jeopardize the company’s reputation if too many people are uncomfortable with this interview technique.
How would you react if this was your interview? Would it make you more or less likely to work with the interviewer if they pulled this stunt on you? Let us know by leaving a comment below!
