A new fad, when interviewing candidates for a potential job, is to ask them ridiculous questions in an effort to figure out how they think. For tough or oddball interview questions, it’s not always about getting the right answers it’s about how you tackle a challenging problem. The question for employers may be really about how fast you think on your feet.
Shine recently posted twenty different questions that are supposedly used by various companies. You can read them here.
A writer for The Morning News, recently took the challenge of answering all 20 of the questions. Most of his answers aren’t very good, and some are downright vulgar, but his answer to Proctor & Gamble’s request to “sell me an invisible pen” is spot on:
Imagine that pen you loved. Remember? It was a great pen. Then that jerk in the office asked “Can I borrow that for a second?†and it was gone, never to be returned. You still see that jerk every day, but have you seen your pen? That need never happen again with the invisible pen. It’s a pen only you can use, because you’re the only one who knows it’s there.
