The #1 Interview Trap Question

We all know that job interviews are full of awkward questions. There is that one about your salary requirements which pitches your desire for the job against your financial aspirations. Then there's the old favourite about naming your strengths and weaknesses - a tried and tested question dreaded by everyone! Then there is that question that lurks toward the end of the interview. It might pop up after we think we have nailed all the questions that came before it. Although it sounds casual and friendly, it is actually the question to watch out for. 

The question is, “What are your hobbies?” Also known as, “How do you spend your spare time?”

It is a question that requires a thoughtful response because all the good things you did up to now in the interview might disappear right before your eyes. It is a question that pops up regardless of where one is in the career journey. Typical responses might include activities that you believe will propel you into the executive suite. These “hobbies” include sailing or golf (country club access potential); competing in triathlons or mountaineering (competitive spirit and fearless traits); or leading a volunteer organization (compassion and organization shown). All to the good if these are in fact the activities in which you spend your spare time.

The truth is often a little more complex.

For the new college graduate, spare time activities could include hanging around with friends drinking beer, playing video games and catching up on sleep based on all the time spent on the first two hobbies named. Or the hobby could be twelve hours a day on Facebook or Instagram. Although truthful, these are hobbies best not described in detail.

For someone more advanced in a career, hobbies could include dropping kids off at school and trying to keep a household together. Or it could be working on that startup idea so that you can build a company and never have to sit through a stupid interview again. Or hobbies could include taking care of sick or elderly parents. Or, for many, a hobby is spending hours every day in a bus, car or train commuting to work. All of these “hobbies” take so much time that they preclude hobbies that you would like to pursue like sailing or golf.

Chances are the interviewer doesn’t have time for much in the way of hobbies either so be alert to the believability of your response.

A middle ground between sailing in the America’s Cup and drinking beer does exist for most of us. The answer to the question does need to be believable and could engender a follow up question by the interviewer. If you claim you spend your spare time volunteering with the local Scout Troop, be prepared that the interviewer may do the same and ask about more details. If you say you compete in 10K road races, be prepared you may be asked about your times or your training methods. Running or jogging is often cited as a free time activity since it can be done on your own and at pretty much any time.

How you spend your spare time is not a test question. It is only a means to try to get you to open up a little more, to show enthusiasm for a non-work activity. The interviewer is trying to get to know you a little, but play it safe. What seems like an interesting hobby to you could be a little weird to the interviewer.

So what is the best answer for such a seemingly simple and benign question? The best answer for all interview questions is to tell the truth. How you describe and embellish that truth is up to you.

SAS Adhesives Starter Kit Promotion

We have an excellent offer on these kits at the moment. These kits are really popular with our customers, the sort of thing that’s really useful, especially on-site as it contains all the essential adhesives you need in one place. If your staff have this kit with them, you know you have everything you need in terms of adhesives!

If you're interested, please call the office with your order on 01245 322 500

Situation Vacant!

Mark Lambert, Managing Director of L&B Technical Services Ltd

L&B Technical Services Ltd, a leading provider of facilities maintenance in the City of London, have an opening for a bright, enthusiastic, individual, capable of working under their own initiative, to fulfil the role of CONTRACTS MANAGER. The successful individual will be a qualified Electrical Engineer with some experience of delivering mechanical projects. They will be commercially savvy and IT literate, able to work as an integrated member of a small but dynamic and hard-working team. They will have to take responsibility and manage outcomes to fulfil the client expectations to the highest standards.


The successful candidate must have excellent negotiating skills and a sense for developing business as they will visit clients to discuss their needs and prepare quotations. They will plan works, organising labour, resources and materials. Working to ISO 9001, 14001 & OHSAS 18001, they will ensure that method statements, risk assessment & works requests are with clients on time. They will progress materials, ensuring everything needed to successfully complete works arrives expediently. They will develop an awareness of works in progress and completion deadlines.


At the weekends, they will manage and control mechanical and electrical facilities maintenance works at our prestigious client’s offices in the City of London. They will organise the labour required for each job and facilitate getting the requisite work force through security and in situ on site. They will manage the jobs and liaise with the client in ensuring that works are completed in a timely fashion to the highest standard, finally snagging each job to ensure that everything is perfect and left tidy before leaving site.

• Experience of mechanical and electrical works essential.
• Salary AAE

Weekend working is an essential part of this role as the majority of work undertaken is out of hours.

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Post by L&B Technical Services Ltd.

Ryan Air- Perhaps the Customer Really is King!

Arrogant airline entrepreneur Michael O'Leary has long been an individual I have haboured admiration and disdain for in equal measures. His business model clearly works, and he has built an incredibly successful business which has brought benefits to millions of people, facilitating cheap flights to many locations around the world.

However he is also an grumpy git who has never held back, telling his customers if they wanted to complain, they were welcome to fly with someone else. So I did. Unless there was absolutely no other option, I fly with Easyjet, or Aer Lingus when travelling to Ireland West. Anywhere else in Europe I use Easyjet. I loathe bad customer service and refuse to accept Ryan Air's attitude to its customers, which is stress-ridden and surly and leaves you wired to the moon by the time you arrive.

It seems the message of the importance of happy customers has finally got through to Mr. O'Leary. Perhaps it was the fact that the way the public identified with his brand was this, that finally forced him to change his attitude?

Whatever the reason, I saw this today about the way Ryan Air will change in 2014 and I thought "Well did Mr. O'Leary". The most important thing about any business is that you have happy and satisfied customers at the end of the day. We live or die by our reputation. Because of a unique product, Mr. O'Leary may have been able to get away with treating customers acerbically up to now, but it seems even he has to admit that the customer really is king!

I don't know if it is a sad indictment, or very amusing that I was pretty convinced this was a hoax at first! He still has some work to do I'd say!

PurgeGate™

If you have worked with inflatable dams before, you may have been frustrated with setting the flow rate. It wasn't that complicated, turn the gas on and set the valve. But if a member of your team was unfamiliar with it or forgot to set it, it could result in a burst dam. HFT have now invented an extremely clever device that eliminates this problem altogether.

This innovation is being widely hailed as probably the most significant development ever for inflatable weld purge systems is PurgeGate™.

This extremely clever device will prevent the inflatable dams from ever bursting due to over inflation.

In the real world of pipe and pipeline weld purging, operators come and go and the opportunity to read instruction manuals rarely arises. Technicians will therefore look at weld purging systems, assess how easy they think it is to use them and will inevitably over inflate dams at some time or other.

Now PurgeGate™ eliminates this problem entirely.

No matter how much pressure or flow the operator puts in to the system, PurgeGate™ will deliver on the right amount, taking all the problems of setting and trial set up away from them.

PurgeGate® is fitted to every HFT® QuickPurge® II and HotPurge™ system as standard. But if you own an earlier system which doesn't have the innovation, you can purchase PurgeGate® from us and fit it to your bladders. 

The great advantage with PurgeGate® is that there is no restriction on flow, you simply plug and play to achieve fast purging with rapid purge results and huge costs savings in both time, money and gas usage.

Call us at L&B today for more information and a demonstration.

The Difference Welding with Trailing Shields Makes

I was recently at Huntingdon Fusion Techniques factory in Bury Port for an update on their products and to see an old friend and business mentor, Ron Sewell. Ron is hugely respected in the industry and is often contacted by multi-national organisations for advice on weld purging practice. I have known him for about 16 years and consider him a good friend. He is a great innovator with deep technical knowledge. This is reflected in his organisation, which is constantly evolving and innovating. It is this professionalism, depth of technical knowledge, and constant innovation, that makes me proud to sell products manufactured by Huntingdon Fusion Techniques.

One insight gained during my visit was with regard to Argweld® Trailing Shields.

Argweld® Trailing Shields allow the user to weld faster, save money and produce bright shiny welds. They are suitable for welding titanium, nickel, and cobalt alloys, stainless and duplex steels and other reactive metals.

Using these devices saves re-work, reduces gas use, and saves wasted material costs by avoiding rejected welds due to oxidation.

Flat models for sheet or plate work are available as well as profiled models for the welding of both internal and external pipes, vessels and tanks.

By using Argweld® Trailing Shields, welds will be left bright and shiny without discolouration and oxidation even when welding at faster speeds.

We keep Argweld® Trailing Shields in stock for most popular sizes of pipes and vessels. I don't think there's any more graphic demonstration of their value than the results of our tests at HFT:

Without an Argweld® Trailing Shield:

With an Argweld® Trailing Shield:

Looking Again at Blackberry

When Apple brought out the first iPhone, it was the first mobile in a long while I actually wanted. As soon as it was launched, I bought an unlocked one from Ebay. This was about a year before they were available at all here in the UK, and I really liked it. It was beautiful, functional and, most importantly, exclusive.

Today of course, everyone seems to own an iPhone. That's not entirely the reason why I've changed though (although it is quite a big part of the reason if I am honest). I started to fall out of love with Apple when they introduced the 4s. There had been several annoying upgrades, which didn't seem to bring much benefit and I hadn't bothered with them. Then I ended up with a free upgrade and got a 4s. Siri was so irritating I very quickly lost patience. Whatever number of sophisticated and nuanced speech patterns it was programmed to deal with, Estuary English is clearly not one of them. Then iCloud came out. Suddenly, my thousands of contacts were merged with everyone else in my house (as everyone had an iPhone by that point). This was incredibly irritating. When they launched the 5, I had it. Different charging connector meant one of my favourite things about Apple, i.e. the way everything worked seamlessly with everything else, was now defunct. Also, any new product where the advert makes a great deal about the manufacturing process, speaks to me as a confidence trick. They're robbing you, because the feel and manufacture of the product should speak for itself, they shouldn't have to tell you they've chamfered the edges, or what tolerance the casing is made to. When my brother-in-law gave me a Galaxy S3 to try, I jumped at the chance, still unconvinced anything was going to live up to the quality of my iPhone, even with my issues. My brother-in-law however, had liked his so much, he had moved on the to Note.

It took a little while to get the hang of it as the operating system was a little different, but the issues were mainly about the direction you swiped your finger in and the use of the menu button and back button to close apps. Once I got use to it, I found this was much better than Apple's hold-down-until-the-running-apps-show-and-then-close-them-one-by-one-method. The best thing about the S3 is its size and shape for me. It is sleek and lightweight and fits into the breast pocket of a suit easily. The iPhone frankly feels like a brick in my pocket, and while the weight lends to a sense of manufacturing quality, it does make it feel a little ungainly. The screen on the S3 is also beautiful and makes pictures and multi-media a joy to view.

On the down side, I found the front facing buttons at the bottom irritating as it is near-on impossible to avoid touching them, especially when passing the phone on to someone else. The OS is a little clunky and can be slow. It lacks the finish of the Apple software. The back is plastic and this is a bit disappointing, although if it is the price I have to pay for the lightness I like, so be it. The only other issue is the battery life, which is awful. I felt like my iPhone was annoying having to charge it every night. As I'm sure you all know, if you are up and at 'em early and out until late, you iPhone juice will generally let you down. By comparison, I felt like the S3 had to be constantly plugged in, allowing only a short hop from one charging device to another, be it a dock on my desk, in-car charger, or plugged in at home.

Then we got a Blackberry Q10 in the office for a new starter. He couldn't get on with it, and it wouldn't connect to the Bluetooth on his car (frustratingly). After some mucking about, I simply (and somewhat reticently) swapped my S3 for his phone, just to get some peace!

We've always had Blackberries at work, I have always HATED them with a vengeance, although I know many business people swear by them. My co-director here, for example has always loved Blackberries, although he currently uses (and loathes) the iPhone 5 (I would not go there, the change in charging lead infuriated me!).

Sure enough I was pretty frustrated with this one initially, for the same reason as I was with the Samsung to be honest. The navigation did not seem logical and I could not work out how to get from where I was, to where I wanted to be. Then I read a quick guide...And it seemed so obvious I didn't know how I was ever confused in the first place.

I absolutely love this phone! It is light, beautifully made, fits well into your hand and has a great tactile feel to it that means it doesn't slip off your wallet and onto the floor (as my S3 always did). The battery life is ENORMOUS compared with other smartphones. It has everything the other phones do, but its operating software is smooth and looks sharp. The physical keyboard doesn't bother me, but it is well made, and there's always the Z10 option if you want to go fully digital. The camera is amazing, and I feel saved with the contacts app, as it is really trying to collate all my info in one place, whereas with the other phones, I felt like they were doing their best to enter the same contact as many times as possible (more so with the iPhone than the Galaxy it has to be said).

Z10 and the S3

The phone has this 'hub' feature where everything that's going on can be viewed and accessed at the swipe of a finger. When you've finished with an app you just swipe up to minimise and see what else is running and you can easily close and manage open apps. Text messaging is great and everything moves smoothly, much more smoothly than the S3. Like the S3, it feels very comfortable in a breast pocket, and because it is noticeably shorter, it also feels comfy in your front trouser pocket. It does the pinching thing to make stuff bigger, it changes view from vertical to horizontal seamlessly, and the screen is great for viewing multi-media and reading stuff.

Another massive difference is the battery life. I can't get over how much better the battery life is with the Q10, the phone will last a couple of days without a charge, no problem. It takes some getting used to after the juicy Apple and the S3 I can tell you. One of my favourite features is the bedside mode, which turns all the applications off and provides you with a cool red clock:

So anyway, whether you've never thought of owning a Blackberry before, or you used to have one and feel like you moved on to Samsung or iPhone, I would highly recommend giving the Q10 a go. It's the first phone since my iPhone 1 I have really liked and enjoyed carrying around, and there's still not many of them out there, so it's a little bit different. I like different!