Ten weird interview questions

There are some standard interview questions that most of us will be familiar with and expect to crop up in an interview. General questions such as ‘tell us a bit about yourself’, ‘why do you want to work for us?’, ‘describe your biggest achievement’ etc. are all typical interview fodder that most candidates will feel well equipped to answer.

Increasingly though, companies are throwing in a curve ball; a seemingly bizarre, unrelated question that can catch a candidate completely off-guard. Often these questions are designed to assess a candidate’s powers of deduction, analytical thinking and general way of viewing the world – with the process of getting to an answer usually more important than the actual answer itself.

Ten of the strangest

Glassdoor.com, a free online career community, recently published a list of the top 25 oddball interview questions of 2011 as shared by their readers. Here are the ones we consider to the absolute top 10 weirdest!

1. Room, desk and car – which do you clean first?

2. What do you think of garden gnomes?

3. Name five uses of a stapler without staples.

4. How would you get an elephant into a refrigerator?

5. How many people are using Facebook in San Francisco at 2:30pm on a Friday?

6. If Germans were the tallest people in the world, how would you prove it?

7. How would you cure world hunger?

8. How many different ways can you get water from a lake at the foot of a mountain, up to the top of the mountain?

9. If you were a Microsoft Office program, which one would you be?

10. Pepsi or Coke?

Handling a weird interview question

Firstly, take your time when answering a bizarre and seemingly random interview question. Your interviewer has designed the question to be intentionally testing and won’t necessarily expect you to have an immediate answer at your fingertips.

Think about what the company does and what the role in question aims to achieve. If there is an opportunity to show off technical ability, mathematical skill or specialist knowledge in answering the question, this is more than likely what the question is designed to do.

For the most part, these bizarre questions are an opportunity to demonstrate your powers of lateral thinking, so try to think creatively about how you could approach the problem. For some of these bizarre interview questions, there may be a number of possible answers and not necessarily a right or wrong answer.

Try not to get flustered, but try to apply reasonable rationale and talk the interviewer confidently and calmly through the steps you’d take to come to a conclusion. Your acceptance and willingness to embrace an unusual question and your efforts to give a logical answer will be looked upon favourably by an employer, whatever answer you eventually arrive at.