Could You Answer These Tough Questions in a Job Interview?
By Jillian Kramer. Photos: Courtesy of CNP Montrose.
We've all been there—totally caught off guard by a real doozy of an interview question, worried our subpar answer could cost us our dream job. Though you may have gotten off easy with a simple "tell me how you've grown as a leader" query, as a new Glassdoor analysis reveals, interview questions can get a lot tougher than that.
Glassdoor reviewed hundreds of interview questions submitted by its users over the last year and came up with a list of 20 that are tough enough to make anyone squirm in her seat. How bad are they? Just take a look at this sampling of 10 of the strangest questions:
1. "What on your CV is the closest thing to a lie?"
2. "What am I thinking right now?"
3. "If you had a friend who was great for a job and an identical person who was just as good, but your friend earned you £2,000 less, who would you give the job to?"
4. "What's the most selfish thing you've ever done?"
5. "You are stranded on the moon with a group of other astronauts and you need to travel 200 miles back to base, here is a list of 15 items salvaged from the wreckage of the spacecraft you were traveling in. List them in order of importance."
6. "How would you describe cloud computing to a seven-year old?"
7. "There are three people, each with different salaries, and they want to find the average of them without telling any of the other two their salary. How do they do it?"
8. "You have 50 red and 50 blue objects. Split these however you like between two containers to give the minimum/maximum probability of drawing one of the colors."
9. "Provide an estimate for the number of goals in the premier league."
10. "Tell me about your childhood."
These questions are all so tough—and some are just plain weird—that it's difficult to pick which is the worst. But as Glassdoor U.K. country manager David Whitby told The Independent, the worst questions are exactly the ones we need to be prepared for. "Preparing for an interview thoroughly means being ready for anything, even a curveball question not directly related to the job," he said. "Remember, it’s not necessarily about getting the right answer, more how you cope under pressure."
This story originally appeared on Glamour.
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