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Caterpillar Chief Rates Well in Job Interview. Other Executives Fail to Impress.

In an interactive feature tied in with this article, we invited readers to vote whether these leaders' answers to their own companies' job interview questions would get them hired - or their resume deposited into the circular file.

The polls are now closed, and the most employable executive, according to Fast Company readers, is Caterpillar Inc.'s chief Glen A. Barton. The chairman and CEO's answer to the question "How do you define good performance?" led to a 74 percent acceptance rate. Now, that's not a bad performance.

Other job candidates didn't fare as well. While New York Life Insurance's Sy Sternberg rated almost 60 percent approval, Digital River's Joel Ronning was a distant third at 48 percent. Ronning went from turbo to torpor.

Continental's Gordon Bethune came close to Ronning's ranking with a 47 percent approval rating, but Edward Jones' John Bachmann didn't even get called back for a second interview: Almost 60 percent of respondents voted to recycle his resume. File under: Customer dissatisfied.

Click here to see the results.

John Bachmann

Managing partner, Edward Jones

Q. Describe something you have done that shows your commitment to ensuring customer satisfaction.

A. Earlier in my career, a client came into my office. He was a nice fellow, but he had a very gruff exterior. He said, "I just need to sit down a minute. I can't think." Soon after, he went to the doctor and discovered he had a brain tumor.

About two months later, I went out to his home. It was a snowy, icy night. When I got out there, he could no longer speak, and he was very frustrated. Then he turned to his wife--you could see he was struggling so hard to communicate--and he blurted out, "Do what John says."

Then the telephone went down, and I stayed with his wife for a while, because at that point, they had no way to get help if he collapsed or something. He died shortly thereafter. And I remember going up to Wisconsin, where his wife had moved, to sit down and help her sort out all their affairs.

Back in 1972, we made a conscious decision to organize ourselves around serving one customer: the individual investor. That was unusual because most companies organize themselves around selling a product. In defining our customer, we said there are products we're not going to sell, even though we can sell them and even though they'd be very profitable. They're inconsistent with what we believe our customers need.

Most recently, we came under pressure to offer online trading. If we add value by helping the customer solve financial problems, then creating a channel that circumvents all of that undermines our basic philosophy. We decided not to offer online trading. Three years ago, that looked pretty dumb. Today, it looks brilliant.