Are you a werewolf or a vampire? The strangest questions asked at an interview.

Text: based on materials from the portal Superjob.ru

Photo: Getty/Fotobank

An interview is, without a doubt, a lot of stress for the applicant. Nervousness is often added to by strange questions that a person sometimes has to answer during such a conversation. The research center of the Superjob portal found out which questions surprise, outrage or discourage job seekers.

Most often, questions about purely personal matters caused dissatisfaction among applicants. 12% of respondents noted that recruiters or personnel officers asked them too persistently or unceremoniously, for example: “When are you planning to get married and why don’t you have children yet?”; “Indicate the first and last names of your friends and their contact information.”

7% of respondents had to answer absurd or difficult questions “to test their reaction.” For example, “how to measure the height of a building with a barometer?”; “Is your boyfriend a werewolf or a vampire?”; “Are you ready to kill a person?” (question to the labor standards engineer); “Why does a fly have 6 legs when a person has 2?” (question to an accountant); “how to find a gay black man in Moscow?”; “What color is the stop valve on an airplane?”; “why is the sewer hatch made in the shape of a circle?” (question to the secretary), etc.

6% of applicants considered the question “why do you need this job?” inappropriate, especially when the continuation of the phrase was “get married and have children.” True, there is nothing special for a representative of the personnel service to inquire about the motives of the applicant. It would be more strange if he didn’t ask about it.

Every twentieth (5%) was surprised by the form in which they tried to test their professional skills during the interview. “Which is heavier: a Boeing 747 or a T-60 tank?”, “How to sell a fur coat in Africa?”; “How to convince a person to cross the street at a red traffic light?”; “Can the Internet be broken?” — such creativity was, to put it mildly, incomprehensible to applicants.

3% of respondents each considered strange questions about their salary at their previous and future place of work, asked in an incorrect form, finding out the reasons for dismissal from a former employer, questions about property and welfare, about dreams and goals not directly related to the work in question speech at an interview. “Are you ready to work for free?”; “Where do you get money for living?” respondents gave examples.

3% also recalled that during the interview they tried to “drive” them according to the school curriculum: they asked what Dostoevsky’s name and patronymic were, how to correctly put the emphasis in the word “will call”, they were asked to name the formula for the area of ​​a circle and the length of the radius of the Earth. An applicant for a secretary position was asked at what temperature water freezes, and a sales consultant was asked how much 400,000 minus 7% would be.

2% of respondents noted that the interlocutor, in a rather cheeky style, asked about the applicant’s possible bad habits (“Do you drink? No? Coded?”), his intimate life and sexual orientation, and even about “what breast size” the applicant has. The same number (2% each) consider interview questions about their zodiac sign, home hobbies, “propensity for corruption,” etc., as strange, as well as about obvious things that are indicated in documents (“What is your name?” in your passport!”; “They hold my passport in their hands and ask how old I am,” the respondents were surprised). People clearly didn’t like the security service’s questions about their bank loans or their attitude towards a lie detector: the initial distrust surprises and offends many.

Every fifth Russian (21%) gave examples of other “strange” questions for him. What was mostly surprising was not the meaning of the phrase, but its inappropriateness or unceremoniousness: “Do you always dress like this?”; “When was the last time you had your hair cut?” Respondents sincerely do not understand why it matters to an employer whether an employee knows how to cook borscht, what his religion is, what infectious diseases he has suffered from, or what he considers his favorite dish. Work is not a family; people are not at all inclined to let their colleagues or bosses into their personal space.

However, every tenth respondent did not hear strange questions or simply ignored them and “did not pay attention to it.”