Interview Questions: How Much Family Background Should You Share with Employers?

Dear all members,

I am posting some interview questions for your views. I will post many questions one by one, not all together. I request all members to participate in this discussion. Please come with your answers. I request senior members with more than 10 years of experience in HR fields to provide valuable insights to us.

Q) Why does the company want to know an individual's background? How much information related to family background should be provided to the company? What is a negative response? What is a positive response? In which areas of the family background should an individual focus? What to avoid saying and what to mention?

Ans:......

Regards,
Sidheshwar

Q) Why does a company want to know an individual's background? How much information related to family background should be provided to the company? What is a negative reply? What is a positive reply? In what area of the family background should an individual focus? What "not to say" and "to say"?

Hey Sid,

Well, I'm not an HR manager, but I do have views on it. Maybe you could use...

Let's start from where I learned about this... HLL... you must have heard about it. A friend once told me that HLL had a tie-up with TOMCO, and they merged into HLL. So what happened in HR... the same thing - strategic synergization... and while this goes on, one thing came up... corruption... why... well, because the people from TOMCO were not up to the mark for the job (they were 55-year-olds with a family to maintain and just had a good raise and sought this opportunity to go ahead and win-win...). What I'm trying to say is that I can only see a thorough relationship between what happened and why it happened to the number of people the managers supported in their family.

This question tells the employer whether you will be facing troubles because of your joint family or nuclear family (I like the joint family... but an IT HR person said he prefers nuclear family workers).

The question should also be asked about the amount of money that is saved or invested by the family for future use, and how many earning members are there in the family, etc.

Questions on family health could also help you diagnose health-related issues that are prevalent in the household or maybe in the future with your potential employee.

Then you could ask about issues that you consider vital and will not harm their feelings... though, I don't suppose to include questions on caste and religion... it's a bit sickening, really.

I hope this helps... sorry for the spelling errors; please don't mind, and I hope this helps... and also sorry for any mistakes; you can't expect all to be correct from a BCom 1st-year student... Cya.

Take care and write back if you need more.

Pratik :)