Around here job interviews are generally brief. Do you want the job? Yes or no.
But for most positions in most other parts of the country and world, the job interview process can be a little more extensive. Other times they can be so bizarre, the interviewers questions could you lead you to question whether you actually even want the job.
A big part of my job is conducting interviews, but I've never conducted a job interview in my life, so how employers and HR departments decide on their lines of questioning I'm not sure. I have been on the answering end of a number of job interviews and they are all different. The most outlandish requests and questions I can recall happened in the same interview for the job I had before this one.
I was asked why my friends liked me, to which I replied something along the lines of "because I'm just such a great guy, why wouldn't they like me?" I realized after I should have said something more clever, like, "What friends?"
The interviewer also slid a tape measure across the table and asked me to measure the table's width and tell him what I came up with.
I must have answered correctly, because I got the job.
Job interview questions have two purposes: to give a prospective employee an opportunity to demonstrate how savy they are for the position and to let employers feel like they are thoroughly vetting their candidates, even if job interviews are found to do very little to see if an applicant is right for the job.
Because of the job interviews limited usefulness, some employers are trying to spice it up with more interesting questions.
A question attributed to Google interviewers in 2011 is "How many people are using Facebook in San Francisco at 2:30 p.m. on a Friday?"
The only thing an interviewer can draw from an answer to this question is how good a candidate can come up with an answer full of nonsense. The correct answer is "I don't know."
Volkswagen asked in 2010, "What would you do if you just inherited a pizzeria from your uncle?"
Well, my uncle doesn't own a pizzeria. Give me the job.
Goldman Sachs asked, "If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and put in a blender, how would you get out?"
I would ask the person who shrunk me and placed me in a blender to please remove me so I don't get blended with his smoothie.
The only answer for these lamebrained questions is a sarcastic one in most cases.
Capital One asked, "Rate yourself on a scale of one to 10 how weird you are."
Well, I really like the term weird because everybody is weird in their own way, and I really like to celebrate the strange things we like and do. I listen to a prog-rock band whose music follows a sci-fi narrative taking place amongst 78 planets called Heaven's Fence. The bad guys have names like Mayo Deftinwolf and Supreme Tri-Mage Wilhelm Ryan. They release comic books and novels to flesh out the story. One of their albums is called Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness. It's super weird, but I can't get enough of those guys.
To answer the question, I'd say about an eight. Would you hire an eight?
