I did not ask this question either (I'm retired now...), instead I always asked it straight: "so, what do you know about the company?"
The candidate doing a homework and researching about the company was crucial to me. How could you be interested in working for company ABC and not bothering to spend some time learning about it? This simple attitude showed a lot about the candidate's planning/preparing skills.
I definitely recommend this more than "Why do you want to work for us?" It makes the intent clearer to people like me who struggle to understand subtext.
I think it's mostly because it is the companies that show interest in hiring me nowadays, not the other way around, but I usually don't do this.
Even when I wasn't a senior dev and had to hussle for an opportunity, I used to fire hundreds of resumes to hundreds of companies through several different platforms and never had the time to meticulously analyse each one of them.
What I would do, when the e-mail/call about the interview came, was just scroll their website to have a vague notion about what they did (and decide if that even interested me at all), but I would hardly call that "research" or "doing the homework". During the interview, if that question was asked, I would just say "I know you're an X company, but tell me a bit about what really happens around here", and I never felt it had a negative impact on how the interview went.
I did not ask this question either (I'm retired now...), instead I always asked it straight: "so, what do you know about the company?"
The candidate doing a homework and researching about the company was crucial to me. How could you be interested in working for company ABC and not bothering to spend some time learning about it? This simple attitude showed a lot about the candidate's planning/preparing skills.
Great! Thanks for sharing this Lior!!
I definitely recommend this more than "Why do you want to work for us?" It makes the intent clearer to people like me who struggle to understand subtext.
:) And who struggle with giving 'correct' answers...
I think it's mostly because it is the companies that show interest in hiring me nowadays, not the other way around, but I usually don't do this.
Even when I wasn't a senior dev and had to hussle for an opportunity, I used to fire hundreds of resumes to hundreds of companies through several different platforms and never had the time to meticulously analyse each one of them.
What I would do, when the e-mail/call about the interview came, was just scroll their website to have a vague notion about what they did (and decide if that even interested me at all), but I would hardly call that "research" or "doing the homework". During the interview, if that question was asked, I would just say "I know you're an X company, but tell me a bit about what really happens around here", and I never felt it had a negative impact on how the interview went.
Great point Mathews!!