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Home / Business / Economy / Employment

Curly questions sort witty from daft

Daily Telegraph UK
25 Mar, 2016 04:00 PM3 mins to read

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Tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple are renowned for asking weird, confusing and frankly mean questions of job applicants. Photo / AP

Tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple are renowned for asking weird, confusing and frankly mean questions of job applicants. Photo / AP

Tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Apple are renowned for asking weird, confusing and frankly mean questions of job applicants.

Here's a selection of questions tech companies asked some unsuspecting interviewees. Answer them correctly and you might just land yourself a job at a world-beating tech company.

1. On your very best day at work - the day you come home and think you have the best job in the world - what did you do?

This is a question from Facebook whose global head of recruiting said correct answers reflect the company's mission - "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected".

2. You are shrunk to the height of a 2p coin and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

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Asked by Google, the answer to this conundrum is jump. Because your density remains the same, your muscles will have the same power as a normal-sized human. This means that you will still be able to jump high enough to clear the blades, even though you're the size of a 2p coin. That's a brain-teaser and a half.

3. A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. Why?

Another one from Google, this one has a much simpler answer: He was playing Monopoly.

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4. If you woke up and had 2000 unread emails and could only answer 300 of them how would you choose which ones to answer?

In asking this question, recruiters at Dropbox were looking for answers that involved interviewees filtering for emails sent to them by their boss.

5. If you had a choice between two superpowers - being invisible or flying - which would you choose?

Microsoft asked this question in an interview for a high level product lead position. It's unlikely that it is intended as a trick question, given that a successful interviewee answered: "That's easy, I would choose being invisible since then I could fly."

6. What would you do if you were the one survivor in a plane crash?

Airbnb asks this question of people applying to be trust and safety investigators. The most popular answer on Glass Door is: "Be glad that I was flying solo that day." One of the least popular was: "I would turn on my cellphone and call you to say that I'll be late for work."

7. Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) walks into your office and says you can have a million dollars to launch your best entrepreneurial idea. What is it?

Amazon likes to think big, so this question is probably testing candidates about their ability to come up with creative ideas. That said, a funny answer given on Glass Door could trick them into giving you the job: "I cannot tell you right now, I am in an interview, once I get hired we can talk about it."

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