That sounds like a pretty typical question to me. I've never asked it, but I've heard it in interviews a time or two, including the interview for my current gig. Common variations replace "difficult people" with "inappropriate/impossible requests" etc.
For the whole class of questions like this, you're generally much better off briefly retelling and analyzing a narrative about a past situation than jumping straight into the platitudes. As the great Admiral would point out, though, it's a trap - Don't go negative, and make sure your answer stresses the professionalism and calm, friendly manner you've dealt with these issues in the past.
Sean Crago
PS: My apologies for the blank message that preceded this - Gmail+tiny pipe glitch.
On 6/8/09, Sean Crago cragos@gmail.com wrote:
It's a style of interviewing known in HR circles as "behavioral interviewing". My former employer required interviewers to walk through an entire script of such behavioral questions even when hiring for technical positions.
Having been pulled into many interviews for programming positions at this company, I found it very frustrating because it left little time for assessing the candidate's technical prowess. The HR team often gave more weight to culture fit as opposed to being able to explain something like the space and time complexity of various programming data structures, for example.
I'm sure HR folks can justify using this interview technique, but for technical positions it needs to be supplemented with other interviews that carry just as much (or more) weight than the behavioral portion, in my experience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_interview#Behavioral_interview http://www.career.vt.edu/Jobsearc/interview/Behavioral.htm
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Sean Cragocragos@gmail.com wrote:
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Joe Holloway -
Sean Crago