Search icon

Life

17th Aug 2015

These Are The Ten Toughest Job Interview Questions – How Would You Answer?

Number eight has sent shivers down our spines.

Megan Cassidy

As the techosphere expands and diversifys every day, so do the ideal job candidates. 

Companies like Google started the trend for outlandish interview questions in a move away from the academic and towards an emphasis on character and thought processes.

As the ideal candidate became more and more diverse, so did the questions and in a lot of cases, tasks.

interview

The Google interview has reached cult status as one of the toughest of these wacky interviews to succeed at.

Now, it seems a lot of other companies are following suit and thinking outside the box when it comes to interview questions.

interview 2

Best-selling author Bernard Marr compiled a list of the trickiest questions and tasks posed in interviews for a LinkedIn article.

While some of the questions may seem simple enough on the surface, what is being examined is often far more complex.

The questions are as follows.

1. Bring an item with you to the interview that best represents your personality.

This will be quite revealing for the interviewer and absolutely baffling for the interviewee.

2. You just got back from a 2 week holiday and have 300 emails to process in the next hour. Go.

This is to check how you go about completing mammoth tasks in a short period of time.

interview 3

3. Move these three chairs from one end of the room to the other.

Seemingly simple, but they are actually testing how efficiently you complete easy tasks, and how your thought process works.

4. Name as many uses as you can for a lemon.

Testing how quickly and creatively you can think in emergencies.

5. How many people flew out of Chicago last year?

The point of these questions is not to get the correct answer, thankfully, but again the focus is on your creative process.

interview 4

6. How would you unload a 747 full of jellybeans?

Here, the correct answer should start along the lines of “it depends”… it’s all about thought process. Am I unloading them onto concrete? Do they need to be eaten later? etc.

7. Describe the color yellow to a blind person.

This is probably to test communication skills.

8. What is your favorite song? Perform it for us now.

This is most likely to check how your personality fits in with the company culture.

interview 5

9. If you were a pizza delivery man, how would you benefit from scissors?

This infamous question is reportedly asked by Apple to determine creative thinking skills.

10. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.

This is a Google question and perhaps the sneakiest of all. Bernard reckons that saying “I don’t know” might just be the best answer here, as the company may be looking to see how long you will spend at tasks that will end up fruitless – and also demonstrates that the candidate is able to admit when he doesn’t have all the answers.

So how do you think you’d do?

interview 6