In the majority of job interviews, the same questions are wheeled out ad infinitum. You can go to two interviews for wildly differing job roles in completely different sectors, and almost guarantee the same questions will crop up.
Q: Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?
A: Harvesting the grapes on my very own vineyard
Q: What are your weaknesses?
A: How long have you got?
Your responses to these cookie cutter questions can be so polished and rehearsed (unlike the above) that they provide very little insight into your character or the way you think.
Increasingly, many leading companies are choosing to buck the trend and ask more obscure, off-the-wall questions to catch candidates off guard. These questions are designed to assess a candidate’s analytical thinking and how they view the world. And, in many cases, the process of getting to the answer is more important than the answer itself.
So here, courtesy of Glassdoor, are some of the strangest interview questions of 2015. What would your answer be?
1. Describe the colour yellow to someone who is blind
(Asked by Spirit Airlines, USA)
2. If you had to unload a 747 full of jelly beans, what would you do?
(Asked by Bose, USA)
3. Give me 7 things you can do with this pen?
(Asked by HitFox Group, Germany)
4. How would you measure the height of a building with a barometer?
(Asked by Unicredit Management Consulting, Germany)
5. What was your opinion of the film Blair Witch Project?
(Asked by Jeffries & Company, a UK investment company)
6. How would you sell a fridge to an Eskimo?
(Asked by Harrods, UK)
7. If you woke up and had 2,000 unread emails but could only answer 300, how would you choose which to answer?
(Asked by Dropbox, USA)
8. What is the wildest thing you’ve ever done?
(Asked by Metro Bank, UK)
9. What would you take with you to a deserted island and why?
(Asked by Urban Outfitters, UK)
10. Explain how to cook eggs perfectly
(Asked by Fraunhofer Society – a German research facility)
So how did you do? If you came up with well reasoned answers rather than a shrug of the shoulders or a one-word answer, there’s every chance you would have passed the obscure interview question test. If nothing else, at least this prepares you to think ‘outside the box’ and could be just the practice you need to ace your next language job interview.
Have you been on the receiving end of any weird and wonderful interview questions? Get in touch in the comments section below with the question you were asked and your answer.