Weird interview questions?

[Watdidusay]

I recently posted about my HR team hosting an actual mandatory trauma bonding session for my team. I'm now job seeking again.

Have had my first interview today and I'm already finding it miserable. The HR team member performing my screening interview asked me several questions about my childhood including "what were you like socially as a child?" and "what were your greatest strengths as a child?"

Is this just how the working world is now? This all seems nuts to me. I don't even work in a people -centred role.

Not in my world! I work in a professional role and interview people. The standardised questions are all about challenges, team working, responsibility etc, alongside technical questions about their knowledge of the role itself.

I read your earlier post about trauma bonding and was horrified.

There does seem to a trend towards reflective or values based questions that focus on you as person rather than the role.itself. It's unusual to get two questions childhood questions so similar though, but something like 'what was your work ethic like as a young person?' is trying to do a few things:

1. See how self reflective you can be.
2. Can you answer the question in an engaging and insightful way.
3. How do you convey information about yourself.

Patrick Lencioni’s The Ideal Team Player, gives a bit of insight into this approach.
I'm not saying this is a good way to recruit, but it does seem to be trendy atm.