Job interview? These are some of the toughest questions you'll hear
Image: REUTERS/Francois Lenoir
Top companies seem to love tough interview questions.
Flub one tricky query, and you could end up derailing your whole job interview.
That's why it's important to be prepared.
Fortunately, there's Glassdoor. The job site hosts reviews and ratings for 640,000 companies in 190 countries.
Glassdoor recently analyzed all of the approved interview questions that US-based job candidates shared on its site during the last 12 months and picked out the ones that had been rated "very difficult" or "difficult" by community members.
Visit Glassdoor for a complete list of tough questions, which appear in no particular order.
Here are some of the potentially pitfall-inducing questions:
1. 'How do you explain a vending machine to someone who hasn't seen or used one before?'
Position: Global data analyst
Company: Bloomberg L.P.
More Bloomberg interview questions.
2. 'How many fire hydrants are there in Los Angeles County?'
Position: Software engineer
Company: Disney Interactive Studios
More Disney interview questions.
3. 'If your current employer had an anniversary party for you, what five words would be written on the cake to describe you?'
Position: District manager
Company: Express
More Express interview questions.
4. 'Who in history would you want to go to dinner with and why?'
Position: Flight attendant
Company: PSA Airlines
More PSA Airlines interview questions.
5. 'Prove that hoop stress is twice the longitudinal stress in a cylindrical pressure vessel'
Position: Test operations engineer
Company: SpaceX
More SpaceX interview questions.
6. 'What's the capital of Canada?'
Position: Team leader
Company: OpticsPlanet
More OpticsPlanet interview questions.
7. 'Name a brand that represents you as a person'
Position: Brand strategist
Company: Twitter
More Twitter interview questions.
8. 'Estimate how many employees are in the next building'
Position: Data scientist
Company: Risk Management Solutions
More Risk Management Solutions interview questions.
9. 'How many happy birthday posts do you think Facebook gets in one day?'
Position: Sales operations
Company: Facebook
More Facebook interview questions.
Don't miss any update on this topic
Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.
License and Republishing
World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
Stay up to date:
leadership
The Agenda Weekly
A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda
You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in our emails. For more details, review our privacy policy.
More on LeadershipSee all
Ida Jeng Christensen and Raju Narisetti
October 29, 2024
