Interviews can be nerve wracking and stressful. You spend (hopefully) hours preparing and practicing your answers to all the standard questions so that you can impress the interviewer with your experience and expertise. (If you don’t have a standard list of questions to practice answering, check out our blog post on the common but tough questions)
If you find yourself in the hot seat with a challenging and unique question just take a breathe and answer it honestly as best you can.
Have you ever be so confident and prepared until the interviewer throws you a curve ball and asks some creative question that wasn’t on your list? Adam Bryant of New York Times interviewed Mitch Rothschild, CEO of Vitals, and went through his some of the questions he uses to get candidates to “drop their interview face.” Here are the questions:
- When you’re not at work, what do you do two standard deviations better than anybody else?
- What am I not going to like about you in 90 days and what do you think you are not going to like about me?
- What percentage of your life do you control?
- If this interview were reversed and I was coming to your house and you were interviewing me because you had 16 different job offers to choose from, what would you be looking for from me?
Motivated by these questions, we scoured the Internet to dig up some other great yet unique questions that might come up in your next interview.
- What was the last class, seminar, course, or workshop you attended, and why did you take it?
- If you were hired, what would you accomplish in the first hour you were on the job?
- How would you guide an alien through making a peanut butter sandwich? [Tweet This]
- Rate me as an interviewer on a scale from 1-10. [Tweet This]
Sitting in the hot seat, several things can help you answer challenging questions, like taking a deep breath, or just answering honestly. Most interviewers know that they are throwing you off with a non-standard question and will be understanding if your answer isn’t as polished, as a typical answer would be.
What are some of the most interesting, strangest and surprising questions you’ve been asked in an interview? How did you handle them?