Top 5 Nightmare Interview Questions

Companies love asking off-the-wall questions in interviews, just to keep you on your toes.  A famous Google question is to sit the candidate down in the room, and 30 seconds later ask him to close his eyes and describe various objects in the room, to see how observant they are. Some questions are seemingly abstract and strange, while others are just plain difficult. Despite many of the questions being seemingly arbitrary, here are five favorites that come up often.

1) The Two-Bucket Trick

Q: Imagine you are given two buckets: a 5-gallon and a 3-gallon, and an infinite supply of water. Measure out 4 gallons.

A: The answer isn’t as simple as it sounds.  There’s only one quickest way, and that is:

a)     Fill the 3 gallon and pour it into the 5 gallon

b)     Fill the 3 gallon again and pour as much as you can into the 5 gallon, leaving 1 in the 3 gallon bucket

c)     Empty the 5 gallon and pour the 1 gallon from the smaller bucket into it

d)     Fill the 3 gallon, giving you four gallons in total

2) Name Your Biggest Weakness

This is the number one most hated question asked in interviews. What they are asking is not for you to tell them something that is actually a strength in their eyes, like “I work too hard”. What they want from you is a perceived development area that is minor in terms of its ability affect the job you have to do, but big enough that improving it will make a large difference to your effectiveness as an employee and overall person. Always follow your weakness with what you need to do to fix it. Some suggested answers include:

a)     I’m not good at saying ‘no’ – I need to learn to delegate and rely on my team more.

b)     I get bogged down in the details – I need to learn to focus on broader objectives and see the bigger picture (not good if you are applying for a job where attention to detail is more important).

c)     I don’t have as much management experience as I’d like – I believe that I have strong leadership potential, but I really want the opportunity to grow these skills.

d)     I tend to spread myself too thin, taking on projects that aren’t related to my job when asked – I need to learn to be more focused on my core objectives (another way of saying A).

e)     I occasionally over-think problems – I need to learn to be more decisive and proactive in dealing with issues.

3) If There Are 120 Million Houses in the U.S., How Many House Painters Are There?

For this problem, they just want to see how your mental logic and estimation skills work, rather than a "correct" answer.  The standard answer is below, but remember that it just takes reasonable estimation and a sound, simple process to come to a good answer.

a)     If the average painter can paint 40 houses a year, and

b)     There are 120 million houses, that each get painted every 10 years, which means

c)     12 million houses get painted every year

d)     Therefore 12,000,000/40 = 300,000 house painters

4) If You Could Be Any Animal, What Would You Be?

This question is lame, but it comes up. There are no right answers, but don’t go for something weird like an iguana or fighting mantis (or a cheetah). Just pick something loved that is loyal and has personality traits that can be related to positive workplace ethics.

5) What Are the Odds of Rolling 11 or 12 on Two Dice?

You might get this, or some variation of it.  The trick is just to think about it logically, and asking, “How many ways can you get X?”  In the case of 11, there are two combinations of die landings that give you this number (6 and 5 or 5 and 6 – it sounds the same but there is a 1/36 chance of both happening, giving you a 2/36 chance of it happening at all). Lastly, there is only one way to get 12 – a 1/36 chance.  This means that in order to roll an 11 or 12, you have to roll 3 out of a possible 36 combinations.  This reduces to an answer of 1/12. NB: There are 36 chances because for each die you multiply the combinations by the number of faces on the die, so the possible combinations you can get from n dice is 6ⁿ.

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2. MBA Degree: Two Questions You Need to Answer
3. Preparing for the Interview
4. 11 Tricks to Nail That Job Interview