I’ve been dealing with stupid and idiotic interview questions for a very, very long time.
It’s been more than 25 years since I heard a City Editor I used to work with asking a reporter applicant, “If you could be a criminal (or a tree/color/milkshake), what kind would it be?” and I wondered then as I do now, what the hell do you find out about a potential employee by asking them crap like that?
That’s why Glassdoor‘s annual list of the Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions released this week is so instructive, because it gives a little insight into the kind of silliness that goes on in the interviewing process.
2 key things about the “odd” question list
The Glassdoor list, which they say is “compiled from the tens of thousands of interview questions shared by job candidates over the past year,” is designed “to help job seekers prepare for challenging or unexpected questions that may arise during an interview.” It may certainly do that, but it also does two other things that I can see:
- It puts a spotlight on how much bad interviewing goes on each year; and,
- It shows that some of the “oddball” questions are actually pretty interesting and may not be so odd at all.
Here are some of the wackiest ones I pulled out of the Glassdoor list (and you can go to the complete list here):
- “A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?” – Asked at Clark Construction Group, Office Engineer candidate.
- “Can you say: ’Peter Pepper Picked a Pickled Pepper’ and cross-sell a washing machine at the same time?” – Asked at MasterCard, Call Centre candidate.
- “What’s your favorite song? Perform it for us now.” – Asked at LivingSocial, Adventures City Manager candidate.
- “How many cows are in Canada?” – Asked at Google, Local Data Quality Evaluator candidate.
- “What kitchen utensil would you be?” – Asked at Bandwidth.com.
Questions that actually made sense
Reading these questions makes you wonder: why would anyone in a hiring position care about Canadian cows (except perhaps Canadian farmers) or kitchen utensils? What could this possibly have to do with how successful they would be on the job?
But, there were some on the oddball question list that actually seemed like they had a lot of merit. They included:
- “Jeff Bezos walks into your office and says you can have a million dollars to launch your best entrepreneurial idea. What is it?” – Asked at Amazon, Product Development candidate.
- “What do you think about when you are alone in your car?” – Asked at Gallup, Associate Analyst candidate.
- “Have you ever stolen a pen from work?” – Asked at Jiffy Software, Software Architect candidate.
- “You are a head chef at a restaurant and your team has been selected to be on Iron Chef. How do you prepare your team for the competition and how do you leverage the competition for your restaurant?” – Asked at Accenture, Business Analyst candidate.
Some of you may not agree, but I believe these last four questions questions work because the answers might reveal something insightful about either the candidates’ character, or, their planning, preparation, and vision. And, those are all great qualities to explore in a potential hire.
Are there no good applicants out there?
So, take a look at these “oddball” interview questions and remember this: for every oddball question there is an oddball interviewer, and somehow, THEY got hired for a job. Remembering that might put some of these questions into perspective.
Of course, there’s a lot more than odd interview questions in the news this week. Here are some HR and workplace-related items you may have missed. This is TLNT’s weekly round-up of news, trends, and insights from the world of talent management. I do it so you don’t have to.
- Are there really no good job applicants out there? It’s a provocative questions asked this week in The New York Times’ Economix blog. And as author Catherine Rampall notes, “Despite the glut of workers, the share of small businesses saying they couldn’t find the talent they wanted was generally rising from December 2009 until September 2012, when it reached its highest point since the recession began five years earlier. What’s especially odd about these survey responses is that if employers are having trouble finding qualified workers, they should be bidding up wages to attract the few qualified workers who are out there. But that’s not what the data show. … Average hourly earnings in the private sector fell over the period that businesses reported having increased trouble finding qualified workers (December 2009 to September 2012). Perhaps this means businesses are having trouble finding qualified workers precisely because they’re unwilling to pay new hires enough money.”
- What do you know about your workplace rules? Every company and workplace has rules, and as Cindy Krischer Goodman reports in The Miami Herald, what you don’t know about your workplace rules could get you fired. “The holidays are over, your boss is still a jerk and now you’re deciding whether to set him straight about how to treat you in 2013. What you do next could cost you your job, shut you out of your industry for awhile or help you win a case against your employer. As we launch into a new year, it’s an ideal time to brush up on your workplace rights.”
- Is this the year for workers to find a new job? The Christian Science Monitor says that it is — if the economy will let you. “With America’s slow-growth economy looking stable, 2013 is shaping up to be the year that many workers look for a new job. After years of slogging in their current positions, unable to move because of the lack of new openings, workers are eager for a new job… If the job market continues on its current path, those who are aiming to work in growth industries should be able to make the jump. … Many Americans are eager to change jobs. In a new suvery of 1,000 workers, 38 percent are resolved to find a new or better job this year, according to Indeed.com, a job-search website. In a separate survey of 2,250 adults by Glassdoor, an online career-search company, 33 percent of workers say they will look for a new job this year if the economy doesn’t contract; more than half of those plan on looking in the next three months.”
- The problem with “reply all.” Are you one of those people who gets tired of being copied on emails that you really don’t need to see? It’ an ongoing problem in the workplace, as the San Francisco Chronicle notes: “At least 15 percent of a typical office worker’s day is spent on e-mail, and 5 percent of e-mails received are replies to all, according to data from VoloMetrix, a Seattle startup that tracks, minute by minute, how its clients’ employees use technology at work. While that might sound like a small number, spread those stats over a 10,000-employee company and “you rapidly get to a pretty big number in terms of dollar cost – in the tens of millions of dollars” per year, says VoloMetrix founder Ryan Fuller. For worker productivity, he says, “it’s death by a thousand cuts.”