How to Answer Weird Interview Questions

We asked our Facebook fans, Twitter followers and those of you who came to our homepage, “What is the strangest question you’ve been asked in a job interview?”

Well, we got some weird ones.

They ranged from, “What type of cereal would you best describe yourself as?” to “How would you explain Facebook to your grandma?” to “We hold a lot of office parties, what food would you bring?” to “If you had to make a shoe with anything in this room, how would you make it?” and a personal favorite, “How would you explain what a chair is to an alien?”

Now, we’re not sharing all these really strange questions with you to make you nervous (though I can understand if they do!). We want to help you prepare yourself in case something like this is thrown at you.

The biggest theme we saw when we asked this was the “If you were a …. what would you be, and why?” The examples we saw were fruit, furniture, plant, animal, food, color, superhero and many more.

So, why are they asking you this?

They want to see if you can think fast on your feet. Customers will sometimes come up with some off-the-wall questions and the interviewer wants to make sure you can handle what’s thrown at you. It’s not so much the example you pick, but your confidence in creating a scenario off the top of your head and your reason for picking that particular fruit/furniture/plant/animal/food/color/superhero.

Here’s how I would answer, “If you were a piece of furniture, what would you be and why?”

I would be a coffee table. I enjoy interacting with people, and, with my family at least, we usually gather around the coffee table whenever we get together.

Don’t worry too much if you don’t give the answer you think they wanted to hear. Remember, they are looking to see how you can handle strange situations. Just make sure you sound like you know what you are talking about and they may just agree with you!