How Word Problems and Trivia may affect your next Executive Job Interview

Although resumes and interviews help companies get a clearer picture of your skills, experience, and personality, they can often leave out an important characterisitic about you. Unless, that is, you’ve had an interview with a creative hiring team that has developed a line of nail-biter questions that’s objective is to determine if you’re a good problem-solver.

Companies like Goldman Sachs, Smith Barney, Microsoft, and Bankers Trust are some of the companies who ask job candidates questions designed to tell them how good a candidate is at problem solving “on the fly”. When it comes to interview questions, expect the unexpected.

So how should you prepare for your next interview? Brush up on your trivia knowledge and practice solving brain-teaser problems.  No, I’m not kidding.

Take a look at some of the questions that have been asked of job candidates during their interviews.

• You’re trying to get to Truthtown. You come to a fork in the road. One road leads to Truthtown (where everyone tells the truth), the other to Liartown (where everyone lies). At the fork is a man from one of those towns — but which one? You get to ask him one question to discover the way. What’s the question?
  

• Why is a manhole cover round?
  

• You have two containers, one holds five gallons, the other holds three. You can have as much water as you want. Your task: measure exactly four gallons of water into the five-gallon container.
  

• How many gas stations does the United States have?
  

• You wake up one morning and there’s been a power outage. You know you have 12 black socks and 8 blue ones. How many socks do you need to pull out before you’ve got a match?
  

Do you think questions like those listed above are fair to ask a potential job candidate? How much weight do you think that a company should give to the answers they’re given? Have you been asked any unusual questions during job interviews?

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Comments

[Mike]

These types of questions are asked all the time. Trust me I got asked the water one which is from the Die Hard movie, and also the manhole question. The best part of it, the interviewer then asked me questions about my background at the same time, I guess to see if I can solve the problem while talking to him. Anyway the only thing to do is prepare. I found more questions like this at http://www.JobInterviewQuestions.us under the Problem Solving/Logic section.

Good luck on your next Interview!

[Gina O'Leary, General Manager]

Thanks Mike! Hope you did well on your interviews!