Bizarre Questions In Job Interviews

"Are you kidding?"

The average job interview is usually an incredibly stressful occasion at the best of times, as you battle it out with other candidates all vying for the same position. But in leaner economic times when more applicants are going for fewer jobs, companies are making candidates sweat even more by asking increasingly bizarre questions during the interview process.

Massive global corporations like Facebook, Google and Citigroup are just some of the firms responsible, asking about anything from table tennis strategies to Russian roulette and Subway sandwiches.

Other offenders in asking seemingly completely unrelated questions included Capital One, Goldman Sachs and Pottery Barn. Some other posers put to interviewees include, 'Estimate how many planes there are in the sky', and 'How many cocktail umbrellas are there in a given times in the United States?'

The list of the top 20 most bizarre interview questions was compiled by Glassdoor.com to provide anaonymous shared information on interview tips. The online job community said the increasingly surreal and abstract questions posed by companies show them how fast candidates can think on their feet. Rusty Rueff, Glassdoor.com's career and workplace expert, told Yahoo: 'Employers want to see how candidates 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.'

TOP 20 MOST BIZARRE REAL INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

• Facebook: 25 racehorses, no stopwatch, five tracks. Figure out the top three fastest horses in the fewest number of races.
• Citigroup: What is your strategy at table tennis?
• Google: You are climbing a staircase. Each time you can either take one step or two. The staircase has n steps. In how many distinct ways can you climb the staircase?
• Capital One: How do you evaluate Subway's five-foot long sub policy?
• Gryphon Scientific: How many cocktail umbrellas are there in a given time in the United States?
• Enterprise Rent-A-Car: Would you be okay hearing 'no' from seven out of 10 customers?
• Goldman Sachs: Suppose you had eight identical balls. One of them is slightly heavier and you are given a balance scale. What's the fewest number of times you have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?
• Towers Watson: Estimate how many planes are there in the sky.
• Lubin Lawrence: If you could describe Hershey, Godiva and Dove chocolate as people, how would you describe them?
• Pottery Barn: If I was a genie and could give you your dream job, what and where would it be?
• Kiewit Corp: What did you play with as a child?
• VWR International: How would you market a telescope in 1750 when no one knows about orbits, moons, etc.
• Diageo North America: If you walk into a liquor store to count the unsold bottles, but the clerk is screaming at you to leave, what do you do?
• Brown & Brown Insurance: How would you rate your life on a scale of 1 to 10?
• Jane Street Capital: What is the smallest number divisible by 225 that consists of all 1's and 0's?
• UBS: If we were playing Russian roulette and had one bullet, I randomly spun the chamber and fired but nothing was fired. Would you rather fire the gun again or respin the chamber and then fire on your turn?
• Merrill Lynch: Tell me about your life from kindergarten onwards.
• Susquehanna International Group: Five guys, all of different ages, enter a bar and take a seat at a round table. What is the probability that they are seated in ascending order of age?
• Volkswagen: What would you do if you just inherited a pizzeria from your uncle?

When faced with tough questions like these, take a deep breath, slow down and then sound out your thinking process aloud and walk the interviewer through how you get to an answer. If you feel the question is unrelated to the job or company, before trying to respond, very politely ask the interviewer, 'In order to best get to what you are looking for from me, can you provide more detail as to how the problem relates to how problems are solved here? You have to ask this delicately though as you don't want the interviewer to think you are being defensive or want to duck the question.