Not Your Average Interview

We’ve all been through the typical interview process, either as hiring manager or prospective employee, where you learn all about a job candidate’s background, what they hope to bring to the position, etc. But have you ever been asked to estimate the number of golf balls that might fit inside a school bus or how much a 747 weighs?

Questions like these are being posed to candidates vying for positions with some of the nation’s top technical corporations such as Microsoft, Google and eBay. These out-of-the-box hiring practices are becoming more common as “companies aren’t as interested in the correct answer to a tough question as they are in how a prospective employee might try to solve it. Since businesses today have to be able to react quickly to shifting market dynamics, they want more than engineers with high IQs and good college transcripts. They want people who can think on their feet.”

The key is to ask questions that will still give you an insight to the candidate’s ability to reason, as they complete the task at hand. There may not be a “correct” or “incorrect” answer, but the true test may lie in how the candidate chooses to approach the problem.

Full article

Test your hand at some additional brain teasers

Posted by Shelly Paul, Career Management Coordinator, The H.S. Group