What irritates you about co-workers?

That I have any.

That would be a very wrong answer, so don't obey that instinct. Don't be flippant if they ask what irritates you about patrons, since that one, or some variation may also be coming up in your interview.

Your answer could end up revealing personal flaws. You reveal that you are uptight about some minor character flaw or laziness which makes you seem like a nit picker. You could also try to dodge with, oh, I love everybody, hearts and flowers, want to exchange bracelets? But you're going to get that little tsk, which means, we're on to you. And you did reveal a flaw: you avoid conflict and just swallow your frustrations instead of resolving them.

You could say something like this:

I've been very lucky to have worked with supportive and helpful professionals, but there are always minor irritants. For example, a former co-worker would often change deadlines, moving up the dates for projects, sometimes without apparent reason. These decisions made it difficult to deliver on time and to provide my best work. However, I usually found that if I discussed it with her that I would usually find out a legitimate reason for the hastened delivery and that we could work out some time around another project.

And look at that: you identified a problem, dealt with it like an adult and sounded reasonable.

If you tend to brush off annoyances, or don't keep a grudge book, you could read Maureen Roger's post, Throwing at the Batter, to find a brief list of aggravations that colleagues can throw at us. Don't just pick one and make up some creative speech. More than likely you have encountered these behaviors, even from normally rational people. Explain it, name no names, describe how you dealt with it and ask for the next pitch from the interviewer.

Brought to you from David Grant's list of 50 Most Common Interview Questions

My feedback is "you suck!"

Tell me about a time when you worked with a colleague who usually gave negative feedback or no feedback for your performance.

Additionally, the interviewer may ask about an overly critical supervisor, or a person who usually corrected you in public. The interviewer wants to know how you deal, not only with stressful co-workers, but also with clients or students who don't have time to fill out evaluation forms or who may tell you flat-out that they hate the job you do and don't want to spend their tax dollars on you doing it (ask a person who's had a book challenge and get back to me, if you don't think people are that rude).

Your answer should show your resiliency by rebounding from negative feedback, how you deal with complaints--diplomatically--and that you can keep a battery-pack full of good comments to get you through the lean times. This is also a BDI question, so you need to come up with an example from the first two--negative feedback or complaint from a customer--to answer the question properly.

What if a patron doesn't like a colleague?

What if a patron doesn't like a colleague and prefers to have you help him/her, every time, even when you are not on your shift?

You have two options to answer this question:

1. This is a hypothetical question, so you can make a guess as to what you would do. You can ask about policies in effect in the library in regards to dealing with "difficult" patrons.
2. You can treat this question as a BDI question. As a BDI question, you must use a true, past experience and explain what happened in that situation and highlight your role. It is best that the experience had a positive outcome, but if it does not, you can finish your answer, hypothetically, stating what you would do differently in the future based on what you learned from the experience.
   

Don't shy away from these questions since they are asking about how you would deal with sticky situations. The interviewers want to know: do you always go running for help? and do you know when to call for help? When it comes to ethics and conflict, you have to strike a balance between the two. You also have to show that you are fair-minded.

Some interview questions are multi-layered and they may have more than one step to solve. An interviewer could take this question into several different directions:

• Collegiality and conflict: what if you don't like your colleague and find them to be abrasive and abrupt, but you know that you have to address the issue? This becomes a behavior descriptive question if the interviewer asks, have you experienced this situation in the past?
• What if your colleague is a person of color or a person who wears a prominent religious symbol and the patron always waits until you--who appears to be of the same ethic group/religious affiliation as the patron--are free? You can also change this if the interviewee is a person of color and say that this patron always waits until you are free, ignoring your colleagues that do not appear to be of the same ethnic group of the patron. This becomes an ethical question: do you say something to your colleagues, to the patron or to your supervisor?

However, I don't think that interviewers should ask this question invoking race or religion if they have not created a policy for their own library staff when dealing with these issues. I have a peeve about these questions, especially in regards to personal conflicts: why do organizations persist in asking these questions when they have no clear internal policy? Some supervisors think they are going to get a silver bullet answer when they haven't bothered to form one themselves.

Discomfort level

Tell me about a time when you worked with a colleague that you were not comfortable with.

This is a variation on  tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a co-worker. This question can be useful to an interviewer in a diverse workplace since "discomforts" may end up revealing a candidate's biases and prejudices.

 

Dealing with conflict amongst co-workers can happen in any workplace, and since this is a BDI question, you need to think about one of your co-workers who was oil to your water, but not matches to your gasoline. Explain, without naming names, how this colleague made you uncomfortable, and the steps you took, beyond suffering silence, to deal constructively with the issue. Make sure the fault was on their side, so a colleague who always arrived late to relieve you from your shift so you could get to class, is a better example, than how you always arrived late to work so you could avoid shift overlaps with this person.



What if you have never had a conflict with a co-worker? Well, you have to tell the truth, I have never had conflict with a co-worker. But I suspect that this is not true, and it has more to do with our perception of the word conflict, which tends to make people thinking of putting up their dukes. Conflict does not have to do with fisticuffs, it has to do with a coworker frustrating us professionally, and how we deal with those frustrations as a professional.

Avoiding this question may also have to do with your truthfulness: you did have a conflict with a co-worker in the past, but you now feel like you acted like a dork and have repented your bad behavior. If this is the case, and you don't look like an immature jerk or a prejudiced idiot, lay out the particulars of the conflict, the outcome of the situation, and how the situation changed your professional--or personal--behavior for the better.