‘What am I thinking right now’, ‘What’s the most selfish thing you’ve ever done?’ and ‘Are you a nice guy?. These are just a few of the tough and bizarre interview questions job seekers today might face.
Job candidates should be ready for any question thrown at them in such a competitive recruitment process. To help, we’ve scoured tens of thousands of Glassdoor interview questions, shared by UK job candidates in the past year, to establish which jobs face the hardest questions*.
Have a go at answering some of these and see how you would fare!
1. “What on your CV is the closest thing to a lie?” —Marketing and Communications Employee, The Phoenix Partnership
2. “What am I thinking right now?” —Regional Director, TES Global
3. “How would your enemy describe you?”—Advertising Sales Grad Scheme, Condé Nast
4. “If you had a friend who was great for a job and an identical person who was just as good, but your friend earned you £2,000 less, who would you give the job to?” —Associate Recruitment Consultant, Hays plc
5. “What's the most selfish thing you've ever done?” —Graduate Consultant, PageGroup
6. “You are stranded on the moon with a group of other astronauts and you need to travel 200 miles back to base, here is a list of 15 items salvaged from the wreckage of the spacecraft you were travelling in. List them in order of importance.” —Sales Employee, Turnstone Sales
7. “If your best friend was here what advice would he give you?” —CCP, American Express
8. “Describe your biggest weakness. Then describe another.” —Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Palantir Technologies
9. “How do you cope with repetition?” —Product Specialist, Tesla Motors
10. “How would you describe cloud computing to a 7 year old?”—Graduate Scheme, Microsoft
11. “There are three people, each with different salaries, and they want to find the average of them without telling any of the other two their salary. How do they do it?”—Technical Delivery Graduate, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence
12. “Who is your hero, and why?” —Product Quality Employee, GE
13. “What’s your the biggest regret managing people so far?” —Area Director, Regus
14. “What would you ask the CEO if you met him one day?” —Performance Analyst, British Airways
15. “You have 50 red and 50 blue objects. Split these however you like between two containers to give the minimum/maximum probability of drawing one of the colours.” —Operations Analyst, Clearwater Analytics
16. “What does social justice mean to you?” —Content Marketing Manager, ThoughtWorks
17. “What is your coping mechanism when you have a bad day?”—Consultant, Switch Consulting
18.“Are you a nice guy?” —Product Manager, Badoo
19. “Provide an estimate for the number of goals in the premier league.” —Management Accountant, VAX
20. “Tell me about your childhood.” —Learning and Development Employee, Next
Job candidates should be ready to take on any question during an interview, so Glassdoor has also compiled a list of some of the Most Common Interview Questions. In addition, it turns out that there is a statistical link between a tough interview process and greater employee satisfaction. According to recent Glassdoor Economic Research across six countries, more challenging interviews upfront are associated with higher employee satisfaction later on.
Have you been asked a tougher interview question than these? Share the interview question with others.
*Methodology: Glassdoor evaluates all approved interview questions shared during the past 12 months (16/1/2016-15/1/2017) by UK job candidates on Glassdoor. To develop the list, we take into account community feedback (e.g., questions tagged “very difficult” and “difficult”) and compile a selection of questions, in no particular order, that gives job seekers more insight into what could be asked during a tough interview.
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