Weird interview questions: why do they ask them?

The job interview seeks to delve deeper into the individual and identify his or her strengths. This is where the odd questions come in

If you’re looking for a job, you’ve probably noticed that more and more companies are including puzzling or strange questions in their interviews. Why? It’s a growing trend that has become fashionable in some companies where everyone wants to work such as Google, Apple or Facebook. But what answers are they looking for with these types of questions?

Human Resources experts claim that recruiters often use this type of puzzling questions to take candidates out of their comfort zone. In this way, they can measure their ability to react to improvised situations, examining their inventiveness, creativity and how their critical thinking works.

In this post, we’ve compiled 10 of the strangest questions professionals have faced in interviews with Apple’s HR department. What do you think the recruiters were looking for with them?

Sales booth

  • You have to deal with an angry customer who has been waiting for 20 minutes and is causing a nuisance in the store. At one point, he says he’s going to go to another mall or the Microsoft Store to buy the computer he wants. What do you do?
  • How much does the Empire State Building weigh?

Head of Hardware Test Design

Draw the internal structure of an iPhone.

Mechanical Engineer

  • Imagine you put a glass of water on an old turntable and start increasing the speed bit by bit, what will happen first, will the glass shoot out, will it tip over or will the water start splashing everywhere.

Project engineer

  • What has been your best day in the last 4 years? And your worst?

Software engineer

  • You have three boxes. One contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and the last one has both apples and oranges inside. The boxes are mislabeled, so no label correctly identifies the contents of any of them. You open only one of the boxes and, without looking inside, take out a piece of fruit. When you look at it, how can you correctly label the rest of the boxes?
  • Are you creative? How would you explain what creativity is?
  • If you have two eggs and you want to find out which is the highest floor from which you can drop an egg without it breaking, how would you do it? What is the optimal solution?

Other positions within Apple

  • Why did Apple change its name from Apple Computers Incorporated to Apple Inc?
  • Break down the cost of this pen.
  • How about you, have you ever been asked any weird questions in a job interview?