Curious Interview Questions

How do big companies attract the brightest and the best in their field? How do you find exceptional candidates? The answer seems to be you need to conduct exceptional interviews. Exceptionally crazy interviews.

Giles Turnbull takes a hilarious crack at answering some of the strangest questions that have actually been asked by companies such as Google, Capital One and Goldman Sachs, including gems like this:

Diageo North America: If you walk into a liquor store to count the unsold bottles, but the clerk is screaming at you to leave, what do you do? What in the name of God would I be doing counting unsold bottles in a liquor store? Are you trying to fuck with my mind? I mean, what is that supposed to even mean? If, for some insane reason, I was in such a store to do such a thing, and the clerk screamed anything at me, I’d probably do exactly what he said. I mean why wouldn’t I? I did get screamed at in a liquor store once. And now I stop to think about it, it was the clerk screaming. But I’m pretty damned certain I wasn’t counting anything at the time. I think I was texting my aunt.

This piece was inspired by an article from CBS MoneyWatch called 20 Craziest Interview Questions.

There's actually an entire book dedicated to these sort of interview questions called How Would You Move Mount Fuji, which I highly recommended. (Obviously, the response to this question is a question: "That depends - do you need to reassemble it later?")

via kottke.org