Interviewers are asking oddball and funny interview questions to hopefully learn more about a potential employee than the standard “ walk me through your resume” question.
In addition, companies are requesting Personality and IQ testing. Some Hiring managers are even taking body language courses too.
What all this means, is when competition is fierce or turnover is high, hiring managers/recruiters have to truly think outside the normal interviewing box and use several techniques in order to make the best decision on who they will hire.
Funny and Curve Ball Interview Questions
- What songs best describe your work ethic?
- Would you rather fight 1 horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses?
- What would you do if you found a penguin in the freezer?
- What do you think of garden gnomes?
- Pepsi or Coke? 6. Are you exhaling warm air?
- How do you feel about those jokers at Congress?
- How are M&Ms made?
- What would you do if you just inherit a pizzeria from your uncle?
- What was your best McGuyver moment?
- If you’re the CEO, what are the first three things you check about the business when you get up in the morning?
- If I gave you $40,000 to start a business, what would you start?
- If you were a brand, what would be your motto?
Think about these questions for your next interview. Why would they ask such silly questions? It is not usually the answer to the specific question that interests them (unless, I suppose, you are being hired to produce M&Ms). It is how you react to that silly question and how much energy or creativity you put into crafting a response.
I tell my clients as we prepare for interviews, a key part of delivering a powerful performance lies in great preparation.
That old adage “fail to prepare, prepare to fail” is true in so many scenarios – not the least of which is interviewing.
Having said that, however much preparation we do, there is always a chance that something will come from left field to catch us unaware. That’s what interviewers are hoping for when they throw out these questions.
It’s not that they want us to be caught off-guard, it is only that they want to see how we react under a slightly stressful situation: do we keep our composure? Do we go silent and stammer around?
How we react to these moments can have a huge impact on the likelihood of being offered the job. React well and we show plenty of useful characteristics like calmness under fire, resourcefulness, maturity, clarity of thought etc. React poorly and we just show that we aren’t that effective when things don’t go our way.
Since we can’t really pre-plan a response to an unexpected situation, the only thing we can do is to expect something unexpected to happen and know how to perform with calm.
But let’s practice. Reach out to me for a complimentary 30-minute conversation.