Interview Questions
I was doing a quiz the other day, and realised that some of the questions would be quite good in an interview. So, I set to deciding what sort of interview I’d subject candidates to if I were to have to interview a panel of candidates. I decided that the questions must be useful to anyone recruiting for a technical role. That is, anything from banking through engineering and science. We’ve come to understand that GCSEs and A-levels don’t allow universities to distinguish between people who look good on paper, so this quiz would be given to each candidate for about 30 mins whilst they were waiting. It’d be accompanied by instructions along the lines of “Try to give a decent answer to as many of these questions as you can”.
The questions are intended, I hope, to distinguish people who are book-smart in specific areas from those who are genuinely good. Most jobs don’t require specific detailed knowledge; there’s no need to ask tedious technical questions when (most of the time) employees will learn the required skills on the job. As such, these questions could be answered perfectly by someone in secondary school However, I believe some skills to be conspicuously absent from workers nowadays, and hopefully this’ll spot some of them.
If you’ve got any comments on these questions, then send me an email - I’d be interested to know if anyone actually used these questions to test the aptitude of candidates.
The questions: Try to give a decent answer to as many of these questions as you can.
- What is the current dollar / pound or pound / euro exchange rate?
- List five members of the current cabinet, together with their positions:
- What do you believe to be the most important story in the news at the moment, and explain why in one sentence. Then explain your opinion on the issue in a second sentence
- Describe something in a few sentences. Perhaps a house you’ve lived in, or a pet.
- Describe the construction of the chair you’re sitting on:
- Why do people float in the space shuttle?
- How much water do you need to float a plank of wood?
- How could you weigh an aircraft?
- Imagine you filled a glass with 4 icecubes in it absolutely to the top. What will happen to the water level when the ice has melted?
- If two metal spheres of identical size, but with one weighing twice as much as the other, were rolling along a table at exactly the same speed and fell off the edge, which would land closest to the table?
- Summarise the article below (some half-side article from a serious magazine - eg The Economist, Nature, or something more relevant to the industry for which the person is being recruited) in five bullet points
- How long is the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle if the other two sides are 7m and 12m?
- Describe the difference between average, mode, median and mean
- Write a flow chart, or write a computer program, to sort a list of numbers into ascending order