The Top 10 Strangest Job Interview Questions – and Answers! – of 2015.
Have you ever asked a slightly bizarre question to a potential future employee during the interview process?
Or have you ever been at the receiving end of a seemingly nutty question in the past?
Read on to discover the official Top 10 Weirdest Job Interview Questions of 2015, along with several of my favourite answers from the poor confused prospects…
Down at Smokey Joe’s Business Bar this week, a small group of entrepreneurial spirits were having a brief discussion on the types of questions they regularly ask when interviewing candidates.
It’s perhaps a very telling sign that the most popular interview question of all is apparently a desperate cry of “When can you start?!”
However, it’s fair to say that the ‘peculiar’ interview question is now being thrown into the mix more commonly than ever before.
Long gone are the days when nearly every interviewer on the planet would just churn out the same old tired and clichéd questions, such as;
Why do you want to work here?
What’s your biggest weakness?
Where do you see yourself in five years time?
We’re now far more likely to think a little more creatively, probe a little deeper, and throw an occasional wacky curveball at the prospect to see if it might reveal a little more of the candidate’s true character.
But do we always get it right?
The job listings website Glassdoor has compiled the definitive list of the most oddball interview questions of 2015, after rifling through tens of thousands of interview questions recently shared by job candidates.
Here are those top ten nuttiest questions, along with some of the most interesting responses…
But are these curious questions a sign of inspirational genius at work, or a sign of a company losing the plot?
You decide…
Question: “What did you have for breakfast?”
Asked by Banana Republic.
Best answers:
Coco Pops, Froot Loops and “The tears of my enemies” were some of my own favourite answers here.
But the most popular smart-alec answer seemed to be Food.
Question: “Who is your favourite Disney Princess?”
Asked by Cold Stone Creamery.
Best answers:
Snow White was a popular answer to this one, but the winner in my book is the person who responded with “They are cartoons. I like all cartoons.”
Question: “If you woke up and had 2,000 unread emails and could only answer 300 of them, how would you choose which ones to answer?”
Asked by Dropbox.
Best answers:
A lot of people who were out to impress mentioned setting up automatic pre-filtering systems.
Others were quick to point out that they had the mental capacity to quickly scan through email subject lines or sender’s names and then rank them all in order of priority.
The person who answered “In order received” very probably didn’t get the job.
Question: “What would you do if you were the lone survivor in a plane crash?”
Asked by Airbnb.
Best answers:
“Gain a new perspective on life,” was one quite philosophical response, although a very shrewd candidate came up with “Be thankful that I was flying solo on that day.”
Question: “Who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Batman?”
Asked by Stanford University.
Best answers:
Both fictional superheroes gained a lot of support from their loyal devotees, but perhaps the most realistic response was;
“Superman is invincible. Batman is merely talented. No contest.”
Question: “If you had a machine that produced $100 dollars for life, what would you be willing to pay for it today?”
Asked by Aksia.
Best answers:
This is either the oddest question of all, or the company has really slipped up in their presentation of the question.
Perhaps they meant to say $100 dollars a day for life.
Whatever the case, the candidates weren’t very impressed.
One curious response to this curious question was “I would pay nothing for it. $100 dollars in a life? I can make that in one day!”
Hmm. I would still have thought that such a machine was worth buying for anything less than $99…
Question: “How many people flew out of Chicago last year?”
Asked by Redbox.
Best answers:
One fairly reasonable response was “Roughly as many people who flew into Chicago.”
An altogether more accurate response was “Zero. Humans can’t fly.”
Question: “What’s your favourite 90’s Jam?”
Asked by Squarespace.
Best answers:
Blackberry Jam was a popular response.
The rock band Pearl Jam was a sneakier one, though.
Question: “Describe the colour yellow to somebody who’s blind.”
Asked by Spirit Airlines.
Best answers:
Wow. This has got to be the trickiest question of all.
It certainly leaves most people in a pickle, and with good reason.
There’s no real right answer or best answer here, although a good starting point would be to get to know the blind person and explore what kind of information would be most relevant to them.
However, I think the real purpose of this interview question is to see how a candidate fares when given a fiendishly difficult question to answer!
Question: “If you were asked to unload a 747 full of jelly beans, what would you do?”
Asked by Bose.
Best answers:
This final strange question was often answered with pleas for further information.
“Are the jelly beans in containers? Do they just need to be taken out of the plane, or are they going to be eaten or sold later?”
A shorter and quite practical answer was “Order the cargo crew to offload the cargo!”
Of course, there’s far more to choosing the perfect candidate to work for your business than asking a bunch of deeply strange questions.
Many of the talented designers and printing boffins here at Martin Print were selected on the strength of what they could show me rather than examples of what they could say to me under stressful interview conditions!
The most memorable interview question that I can recall asking was one that I posed to Old Bert, our resident caretaker, way back in the mists of time.
In fact, I think it was the very first thing I ever said to him.
This was my opening line;
“Do you think you can fix this squeaky chair?”
Old Bert’s hugely confident and overwhelmingly positive response to this question may well have been a big factor in my decision to hire him less than an hour later.
Did he ever fix the squeaky chair?
Nope.
Maybe we should consider the answers to these questions a lot more carefully before jumping to hasty conclusions.
Or maybe we should just ask better questions in the first place.
Maybe I should have instead asked him to show me how he was going to fix the squeaky chair…
But do you have a favourite ‘peculiar’ question that you ask to your prospects?
And what’s the most bizarre interview question you’ve ever heard?
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