Interview Questions from Left Field

In May, Jon Borden, a second-year MBA student from Northeastern University, interviewed at Blue Cross Blue Shield for a position as an IT recruiter. When he arrived for the interview, he was as well-prepared as he believed he could be. Because the position he was interviewing for required an almost immediate start date, he figured the interview would be quick and to the point.

It wasn't long into the meeting, however, before Borden was faced with a question unlike any other he had ever encountered in an interview: "If you could have any superpower, what would it be?"

"I was shocked," he admits. Even though Borden himself used to ask unexpected questions during interviews as an IT recruiter at Addeco (ADO), he admits being caught off guard: "I didn't see that coming at all."

Manhole Cover Puzzle

While not a new trend, asking seemingly unrelated or impossible-to-answer questions aimed at throwing candidates for a loop seems to have turned from an uncommon interview tactic into something much more mainstream, says Lynne Sarikas, director of Northeastern's MBA Career Center. "This is something Microsoft (MSFT) popularized a few years ago," Sarikas says. "They were notorious for asking strange questions like, Why is a manhole cover round?'"

Sarikas explains that much of the reason certain interviewers ask unpredictable questions is to catch candidates in an unguarded moment. "To some degree, it's a response to candidates being too prepared," she says. "These days, you're dead in the water if you're not prepared because companies expect you to be."

William Poundstone, author of How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle: How the World's Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers, says that as far back as the 1950s, companies like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) were asking logic-puzzle questions during interviews to assess how well a candidate thinks on his feet.

A New Era of Interviewing Techniques

"At first I had a lot of skepticism about how well these sorts of questions worked," Poundstone says. However, over the course of researching his book, he spoke to a number of human resource experts who explained the need for, and importance of, such questions. "They have a good point," Poundstone says, "in that if two candidates are exactly the same in every other way, and you're not judging them on how they react to an unusual question in an interview, then you're basing it on how firm their handshake is and how they're dressed, or some other superficial thing."

Expecting the unexpected is the Catch-22 of this new era in interviewing techniques. Yet how does one prepare for a question like, "How many cars would you expect to see in the parking lot of the local grocery store at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning in January?" or "In the news story of your life, what would the headline say?"

"More times than not, you're not expected to have the correct answer," Sarikas says. "In fact, in many cases, there is no right answer." However, she goes on to note that asking seemingly-impossible questions can offer a wealth of information for the companies interviewing, as well as a great opportunity for candidates to showcase their abilities to think creatively and on the spot.

Whirlpool Throws a Curveball

Tiffany Voglewede, recruiting manager for Whirlpool (WHR), says that questions and problems posed to candidates during interviews that may seem off-the-wall can actually be designed to "prepare a potential candidate for what is to come in that company" and can work well to showcase the ability of the candidate to think quickly and innovatively.

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