How Would You Move Mount Fuji?

February 1, 2010 (PLANSPONSOR.com) – You may think you know the standard interview questions all companies ask or that you, yourself, ask some tough interview questions, but new information indicates some employers are getting more creative – or odd – with their interviews.

Glassdoor.com identified its Top 25  oddball interview questions from the more than 14,000 submitted by job candidates through its Web site including:

1. What was your best MacGyver moment?
2. How many tennis balls can you fill this room with?
3. If you were a brick in a wall, which brick would you be and why?
4. How would you move Mount Fuji?
5. If two cars are traveling in a two-lap race on a track of any length, one going 60 mph and the other going 30 mph, how fast will the slower car have to go to finish at the same time as the faster car?
6. Are your parents disappointed with your career aspirations?
7. Tell me how you would determine how many house painters there are in the United States.
8. What should it cost to rent Central Park for commercial purposes?
9. If I put you in a sealed room with a phone that had no dial tone, how would you fix it?
10. If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?
11. How many hair salons are there in Japan?
12. If both a taxi and a limo were priced exactly the same, which one would you choose?
13. How do you measure nine minutes using only a four-minute and one-minute hourglass?
14. What are five uncommon uses of a brick, not including building, layering or as a paperweight?
15. What is the probability of throwing 11 and over with 2 dice?
16. What is your favorite food?
17. Say you are dead. What do you think your eulogy would say about you?
18. Given a dictionary of words, how do you calculate the anagrams for a new word?
19. How many light bulbs are in this building?
20. Given a square grid of numbers, considering all the numbers at the boundary as one layer and numbers just inside as another layer and so on, how would you rotate each of the layers of the numbers by a given amount?
21. How would you sell me eggnog in Florida in the summer?
22. Develop an algorithm for finding the shortest distance between two words in a document.  After the phone interview is over, take a few hours to develop a working example in C++ and send it to the manager.
23. Given a fleet of 50 trucks, each with a full fuel tank and a range of 100 miles, how far can you deliver a payload? You can transfer the payload from truck to truck, and you can transfer fuel from truck to truck.  Extend your answer for n trucks.
24. You are in a room with three switches which correspond to three bulbs in another room, and you don’t know which switch corresponds to which bulb. You can only enter the room with the bulbs once. You can NOT use any external equipment (power supplies, resistors, etc.). How do you find out which bulb corresponds to which switch?
25. If you saw someone steal a quarter, would you report it?

To find out which companies asked these questions and view answers given to the questions, go here.

PLANSPONSOR staff
editors@plansponsor.com