How to Deal With Weird Interview Questions
A job interview is nerve-wracking enough to get asked a weird question like, “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”
However, if you know why such questions are being asked, chances are you can understand what your interviewer wants to know without getting nervous or leaving a bad impression. I asked Alison Greene, an experienced manager and consultant who runs Ask a Manager , why companies sometimes ask such strange questions. She broke it:
With puzzles, they are often less concerned with the answer you end up with; they want to hear how you approach the problem and how you solve it. Therefore, it is important to think your thoughts out loud. But when it comes to downright weird questions, to be honest, this is the result of interviewers who don’t know how to interview. They’ve heard the question somewhere and thought it sounded funny, or mistakenly thought it was a good way to test their creativity. Basically, they just haven’t stopped thinking about how to effectively weed out candidates. This is almost always a sign that the interviewer is really bad.
Companies like Google and Apple used to have a reputation for presenting weird puzzles to candidates, but in recent years they have begun to move away from them . But when looking for a job, you can still run into some crazy mistakes (or just bad interview questions). When it comes to puzzles, Alison recommends puzzling out loud as the interviewer wants to hear how you approach the problem. You can always say that you need time to think and then dive into your answer. For strange questions that don’t catch your eye, try to give a short answer and move on to talking about your skills or experiences that actually have something to do with the job – as opposed to what kind of tree you would be.