They Asked What?

We know that some companies are known for asking bizarre interview questions (we’re looking at you, Google).

But it ain’t just Google that likes to throw interviewing curveballs.

These questions, from Shine.yahoo.com, all come from real hiring managers asking potential interns to do ridiculous things like estimate the number of airplanes flying at any given moment or describe how to play ping pong.

Enterprise Rent-A-Car likes to ask, “Would you be okay hearing “no” from seven out of 10 customers?”

Merrill Lynch asks, “Tell me about your life from kindergarten onwards.” (Yikes.)

The questions were all pulled from Glassdoor.com, so we went on there and checked what Yahoo asks employees. Pretty standard stuff, though one potential marketing manager was asked “How do you deal with creative people?”

Also on Glassdoor, a Yelp intern was asked “How do you make sure people are writing reviews on Yelp?” (Go to their houses and look in their windows?) Forbes asked “What’s [sic] a billionaire you’re specifically interested in reporting on?”

And to get back to the original Shine article, Capital One’s “curveball” interview question may be the most head-scratching one yet: the bank asked: “How do you evaluate Subway’s five-foot long sub policy?”

Huh?

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