Oddball Interview Questions

Over the last 15 years or so, I've been involved in tons of interviews on both sides of the table--job interviews, college/grad school interviews, etc. It's certainly a lot more fun to be the interviewer than the interviewee, with one exception--interviewees are invariably overly prepared to answer the questions they expect to hear, and you therefore hear the same stuff over and over again and it's hard to distinguish between candidates.

What's the answer, then, for an interviewer? Oddball interview questions. Ask something that you absolutely know the interviewee hasn't prepared for or thought about or answered before. Their response not only gives you invaluable insight into how they think, but also lets you know how well they solve problems and operate under stress. That's important stuff.

My go-to interview question was always "what's a million divided by sixteen?", a question that I myself had been asked at an old job interview. It was especially useful for me to ask because I worked for a trading company where mental math was important. There were several ways to get to the right answer (it's simpler than you might think), and just about the only "wrong" answer was "do you want an exact answer?"--yes, of course I want an exact answer, otherwise I wouldn't ask such a specific question.

At any rate, because of my history with oddball interview questions, I was incredibly amused by this post over at glassdoor.com detailing the "Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions of 2010". There's some great stuff in there. A lot of it is garden-variety consulting interview questions, which are famous for asking almost unanswerable questions that nevertheless require some sort of answer (for example, "how many basketballs can you fit in this room", which is on the list thanks to Google), but some of them go far beyond that.

Worth a look.

[glassdoor.com]