Ten wacky interview questions that work

Better be prepared for bizarre questions at interviews...

What if you are being asked something ‘off the track’ for your next interview? While you are all prepared to crack the interview and land up your dream job with all your experience and skill set, something unexpected could catch you completely off guard. And that’s precisely what the employers are practicing often these days. The logic being simple – while the interviewee has rehearsed a list of achievements accomplished and lessons learned, a weird question from nowhere could gauge the candidate’s ability to think ‘out of the box.’

While a bad response or declining to answer is an expected one, smart and creative candidates do come up with an answer. From Glassdoor, Quora, Vault and FlexiJobs, we got some of the wackiest interview questions asked in interviews, which are listed below:

1. You’re a new addition to the crayon box. What colour would you be and why?
2. We finish the interview and you step outside the office and find a lottery ticket that ends up winning $10 million. What would you do?
3. Any advice for your previous boss?
4. Can you name three consecutive days without using the words Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday?
5. Who would win a fight between Spiderman and Batman?
6. A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?
7. How many square feet of pizza is eaten in the U.S. each year?
8. If you woke up and had 2,000 unread emails and could only answer 300 of them, how would you choose which ones to answer?
9. How many pennies would fit into this room?
10. What’s the last thing you watched on TV and why did you choose to watch it?

How to handle this?

Instead of pressing the panic button, take your time when answering a bizarre and seemingly random interview question. Your interviewer has designed the question to be intentionally testing and won’t necessarily expect you to have an immediate answer at your fingertips. Mostly these weird questions are an opportunity to showcase your powers of lateral thinking and hence be creative and answer them smartly. There might not be a right or wrong answer to these questions, but you might be judged by the way you approach the question.Often these questions are designed to assess an interviewee’s power to deduce, think analytically and general way of viewing the world.

– the process of getting to an answer usually more important than the actual answer itself.

Even companies like Google don’t spare candidates from asking such bizarre questions. To a local data Quality Evaluator candidate they asked “How many cows are in Canada?” These quirky interview questions also lighten up the environment and freshen up the interview process. It might as well, test your sense of humour too. Now that you are aware of the reasons behind such weird interview questions, be calm and give your best to answer them.

What is the wackiest question you have faced? Please share your story.