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Your Weirdest Interview Question.

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MolGenBuckeye;1750376; said:
What in the world were they looking for here, and what kind of job was it? I'd answer "I would never waste your money by spending time on the job calculating this by hand."
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Jagdaddy;1750463; said:
Looks like it was probably supposed to be 10,000.
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No, they specifically asked for the square root of 1000. Many people who aren't paying attention will answer 100 without thinking it through. It was for a trading job where you had to do a lot of accurate calculations on the fly in your head.

I think I answered that it was "10 radical 10" and he said what's that. I said it was around 32. He pulled out a calculator and it is actually 31.6 so I wasn't too far off.

After being at an I-bank for so long, I can imagine that NYB has some pretty good ones up his sleeve.
 
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It wasn't really an interview, but during my lifestyle polygraph I took a couple years ago, they asked me if I had ever thought about or pursued sexual relations with any animals.

My answer was that I only lived in Pennsylvania, I wasn't a native. :biggrin:
 
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"Who's your daddy?"

That was a fancy HR consultant in Georgia, who went on to explain that the only things that really matter there are what your father does and where you go to church, which was, of course, the follow-up question.

I've also been asked in every single interview I've had in the past decade if I'm married, have children, am planning to do either, if it would make me quit work, and my age. I also get asked if I drink, but only immediately after mentioning working in Utah, so it's not really about drinking.
 
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fourteenandoh;1750544; said:
No, they specifically asked for the square root of 1000. Many people who aren't paying attention will answer 100 without thinking it through. It was for a trading job where you had to do a lot of accurate calculations on the fly in your head.

I think I answered that it was "10 radical 10" and he said what's that. I said it was around 32. He pulled out a calculator and it is actually 31.6 so I wasn't too far off.

After being at an I-bank for so long, I can imagine that NYB has some pretty good ones up his sleeve.
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Ah, I thought it might have been a softball to test basic math skills (sq rt of 10,000). I was able to figure out it was between 31 and 32 in my head, but it would have been rough to try to get more precise.
 
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Question asked to me by the store manager at Flying Tomato on 15th when I was looking for work while going to school:

"Do you like to have fun?"

I answered, "Yeah! But should we really be lighting this up in the office?" :biggrin: That was a great college job!
 
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Gatorubet;1750475; said:
I'd have to say, "I don't know if they'd fit inside this room - but if you ask me another idiotic question we'll see if a stack of quarters the height of the Sears tower fits inside your ass!"
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Well the question is vague, if your assuming the quarters have to be stacked then it's pretty obvious they wouldn't fit inside the room without much mathematical insight. If their not stacked and just put in any old way it becomes a bit tougher of a problem

OilerBuck;175640; said:
I have also heard that when being considered for a job or a promotion, that the hiring manager will take the applicant out to lunch. If they salt their food BEFORE tasting it, they essentially answered incorrectly because it shows that they will waste a resource (salt) before correctly analyzing a situation (taste of the food) to determine a course of action.
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This logic kind of sucks because on the same token your basically saying you want people who won't fix a problem until after it's broken (aka you've tasted food that isn't good). Do they use this technique for interviews at AIG by any chance? (or any of the other numerous companies we "had" to bail out). Anticipation of potential problems on the job is important too.
 
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Years ago I was told that there were questions that were against Federal law to ask. Well, some how the people conducting interviews never got the memo because I have been hearing for some time stories about "strange" questions. Off the wall questions that have zero relationship to the job. I just think there are a lot of bad interviewers out there. People that don't know what they are doing and have no plan beyond looking at the resume.
So, basically you should lie on your resume because that's the prime decider of whether you get your foot in the door. :lol:
 
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It wasn't an interview question, so much. It was some test.. like a personality or aptitude test or some garbage like that. Something like 500 million questions. Or maybe just 200. It was the end of the day. I was there for 6+ hours, going through interviews, a tour of the plant, more interviews, and finally taking this test. Maybe it was more than one. I know it was the wrong attitude to have (I knew it at the time, too - 12 years ago), but I just wanted to get out and go home.

Let's say there were 200 questions. I only screwed around for 5 at most - probably only 3. The other 195 I took seriously. But the one that sticks in my head was "I wish I knew _____." I wrote in "the force".

I didn't get the job. I hope that's the reason why. If they can't take a little humor in that crap, then they can poop on their tests.
 
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