By Emma Snider
Google is renowned for posing bizarre questions to job candidates lucky enough to be called in for an interview. If you’re applying for a job with the company, you might want to think about how many golf balls can fit on a school bus, or design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.
But brain teasers turned interview questions are no longer exclusive to the search giant. Judging from Glassdoor’s newly released list of the top oddball interview questions of 2015, companies such as Squarespace, Airbnb, and Banana Republic also put forward unusual inquiries that have surely made more than one candidate squirm.
After analyzing the wide array of interview questions job seekers have posted on the site, here are the 10 strangest questions of 2014 according to Glassdoor — along with the most upvoted user-suggested answer.
1) Airbnb: What would you do if you were the one survivor of a plane crash?
Top-rated answer: “Be glad I was flying solo that day.”
2) Squarespace: What’s your favorite ’90s jam?
Top-rated answer: “Blackberry jam — they still have that in 2015, right?”
3) Dropbox: If you woke up and had 2,000 unread emails and could only answer 300 of them, how would you choose which ones to answer?
Top-rated answer: “The automated pre-filtering I have set up should group the most important ones into key folders. Then I would just scan through the sender names and subject lines for the most critical ones.”
4) Stanford University: Who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Batman?
Top-rated answer: “This is an excellent question, not for the question itself but for the opportunity it opens to discuss the intrinsic value of such questions. Lastly, Batman, of course.”
5) Aksia: If you had a machine that produced $100 dollars for life, what would you be willing to pay for it today?
Top-rated answer: “I already have the machine — why would I pay for it?”
6) Banana Republic: What did you have for breakfast?
Top-rated answer: “Food.”
7) Spirit Airlines: Describe the color yellow to somebody who’s blind.
Top-rated answer: “Yellow is a bright color that fills a person with happiness and joy.”
8) Bose: If you were asked to unload a 747 full of jelly beans, what would you do?
Top-rated answer: “Assuming they are loose jelly beans, and their unloading needs to be managed rather than just dumped on the tarmac, start by phoning the people at the other end of the process. They managed to load an entire plane with jelly beans!”
9) Redbox: How many people flew out of Chicago last year?
Top-rated answer: “Zero. Planes fly, people don’t.”
10) Cold Stone Creamery: What’s your favorite Disney Princess?
Top-rated answer: “Princess Leia. (Sorry).”
While some of these questions seem like they would uncover meaningful information about the candidate, others seem engineered to throw people off.
