Below, we've provided some sample off-the-wall questions. The first
group are questions submitted by readers, along with the answers
they used. Be aware that studying this list of questions may be
no help at all if you're ever asked a weird question because you
may be asked something totally different from any of these questions.
The point is to expect the unexpected, and looking over these questions
will at least give you the flavor of what might be asked and enable
you to do a little out-of-the-box thinking about how you might respond
when you're asked a question as strange as these:
Shelley Feakes, resource navigator
at Queens Career Resource Center in Nova Scotia, Canada, was asked:
"If aliens landed in front of you and, in exchange for anything
you desire, offered you any position on their planet, what would
you want?"
"I thought about this question for a minute,"
Feakes recalls, "then responded: 'First I would want to go change
my clothes since the aliens just scared the crap out of me! ...
then I would for a job as Chief Navigator so I could enjoy coming
to Earth and scaring the crap out of other human beings."
Explains Feakes: "My strategy was this:
I first thought that it was a psychological question, that the
interviewer was trying to see how far up the ladder I desired
to be ... then I thought twice and decided that I would express
my creativity and go for an answer that was just as odd as the
question itself. It must have worked ... I got the job!"
Another reader was not happy about the
odd questions she was asked. "I was asked who my heroes were and
how I felt about affirmative action in the same interview. Talk
about loaded questions! Looking back, it was obvious that I would
be required to be very [politically correct] and think just like
them to work there. If I hadn't been a single mother and desperate
for work, I would have answered, 'I think this interview is over.'"
She doesn't remember how she actually did answer, but notes that
"Those questions have nothing to do with the ability to do a job
and are out of line. I'm probably lucky they didn't hire me because
I'm sure I would have been unhappy there."
