To find the year’s most unusual questions, researchers at career site Glassdoor combed through job seekers’ reviews of about 115,000 interviews at more than 26,000 companies. Here is a sampling of what they found:
- “How many people are using Facebook in San Francisco at 2:30 on a Friday?” — Google (vendor relations manager)
- “Just entertain me for five minutes. I’m not going to talk.” — Acosta (leadership development program associate)
- “If Germans were the tallest people in the world, how would you prove it?” — Hewlett-Packard (product marketing manager)
- “Given 20 ‘destructible’ light bulbs (which break at a certain height), and a building with 100 floors, how would you determine the height where the light bulbs break?” — Qualcomm (engineer)
- “What do you think of garden gnomes?” — Trader Joe’s (team member)
- “Would Mahatma Gandhi have made a good software engineer?” — Deloitte (analyst)
- “If you could be the #1 employee but have all your coworkers dislike you, or be ranked #15 and have all your coworkers like you, which would you choose?” — ADP (inside sales associate)
- “How would you cure world hunger?” — Amazon.com (software developer)
- “Does life fascinate you?” — Ernst & Young (tax analyst)
- “Please spell ‘diverticulitis’.” — EMSI Engineering (account manager)
- “Name five uses of a stapler without staples.” — EvaluServe (business analyst)
- “How much money did residents of Dallas/Fort Worth spend on gasoline in 2008?” — American Airlines (revenue manager)
- “How would you get an elephant into a refrigerator?” — Horizon Group Properties (office manager)
- “How many planes are currently flying over Kansas?” — Best Buy (demand planning analyst)
- “How many different ways can you get water from a lake at the foot of a mountain, up to the top of the mountain?” — Disney Parks & Resorts (DIS) (project engineering intern)
- “Pepsi or Coke?” — United Health Group (associate project manager)
- “Are you exhaling warm air?” — Walker Marketing (client manager)
- “If you were a Microsoft Office program, which one would you be?” — Summit Racing Equipment (e-commerce manager)
- “How do you feel about those jokers in Congress?” — Consolidated Electrical (management trainee)