How to Handle Weirdest Job Interview Questions

I once interviewed for a job with a documentary producer who made boring if well-meaning films for public TV. By way of preparation, I studied up on the producer's projects and gave a lot of thought to how my interests and experience dovetailed with his. Our chat went swimmingly until he asked me a question that caught me completely off guard: "Who is your favorite comedian?"

Wait a second, I thought. Comedy is the opposite of what this guy does. My mind did backflips while I desperately searched for a comedian who might be a favorite of a tweedy, bearded liberal Democrat. After maybe 30 seconds too long, I blurted out my personal favorite: David Alan Grier, an African-American funnyman on the weekly Fox TV show "In Living Color." My potential boss looked at me blankly as I babbled about how much I liked Grier's characters, especially Antoine Merriweather, one of the two gay reviewers in the brilliantly hilarious sketch "Men on Film."

Wrong answer. I had derailed the interview. My potential employer asked me a few more perfunctory questions and then saw me to the door.

The craziest questions
We all prepare studiously for job interviews, doing our homework about our potential employers and compiling short but detailed stories to illustrate our accomplishments--but how in the world do we prep for an off-the-wall interview question?

Glassdoor.com, a two-year-old Sausalito, Calif., website that bills itself as the TripAdvisor for careers, has compiled a list of "top oddball interview questions (Glassdoor gets its information directly from employees who work at 84,000 companies).

1. Crazy as it sounds, an interviewer at Schlumberger, the giant Houston oilfield services provider, asked some poor job applicant, "What was your best MacGyver moment?"--referring to a 1980s action-adventure TV show.

2. At Nestle USA, the question was "If you were a brick in a wall, which brick would you be and why?"

3. At Microsoft: "How would you move Mt. Fuji?"

4. At Boston Consulting: "How many hair salons are there in Japan?"

5. And at Pacific Sunwear: "If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?"

The right answers
No matter where you apply for work, there's always a chance you'll get a question from left field. According to Rusty Rueff--a consultant at Glassdoor who is the author of "Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business" and former head of human resources at PepsiCo and Electronic Arts--most job applicants are woefully unprepared for off-the-wall questions. "Ninety percent of people don't know how to deal with them," he says. Like me, they freeze, and their minds go blank.

To deal with that, Rueff advises, first you have to realize that the interviewer isn't trying to make you look stupid, as stupid as the question may seem. For instance, the MacGyver question is meant just as an invitation to talk about how you got out of a tough jam. "They're not looking for you to tell about the time you took out your ballpoint and did a tracheotomy," Rueff notes. Rather, you can probably extract an answer from one of the achievement stories you prepared in advance.

With a question like "How many hair salons are there in Japan?" the interviewer is giving you an opportunity to demonstrate your thought processes. Rueff says you should think out loud, like the contestants on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." You might start by saying, "We'd have to know the population of Japan, and then we'd have to figure out what percentage of them get their hair done and how often." Rueff says it's fine to pull out a pen and paper and start doing some calculations right there in the interview.

How to prepare in advance
Connie Thanasoulis-Cerrachio, a career-services consultant at Vault.com, agrees with Rueff. "These are called case interview questions," she says. Another example, which may seem equally impossible to answer: "Why are manhole covers round?"

In fact the manhole cover question, and "How would you move Mt. Fuji?" were brought to light in a 2003 book, "How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle: How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers." Microsoft's grueling interview process often includes such problem-solving and logic questions. Just start thinking through the question, out loud, Thanasoulis-Cerrachio advises. "I would say, 'A round manhole cover could keep the framework of the tunnel stronger, because a round frame is much stronger than a square frame,'" she suggests. In fact, there are several reasons, including the fact that a round lid can't fall into the hole the way a square one can and the fact that it can be rolled.

Business schools teach students how to deal with case interview questions, and Vault has even put out a book on the subject, "Vault Guide to the Case Interview."

Other weird-seeming questions, like "If you were a brick in a wall, which brick would you be and why?" or "If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?" are really just invitations to show a side of your personality. Thenasoulis-Cerrachio says a friend who is chief executive of a market research company used to ask applicants what kind of car they would be. "She wanted someone fast, who thought quickly," Thenasoulis-Cerrachio says. "She wanted someone who wanted to be a Maserati, not a Bentley." For the brick question, Thenasoulis-Cerrachio advises saying something like "I would want to be a foundational brick because I'm a solid person. You can build on my experience and I will never let you down."

According to Rueff and Thenasoulis-Cerrachio, my comedian question was also a behavioral question, a test of my personality. "You gave a fine answer," says Rueff. Maybe. But I didn't get the job.