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Here are 17 silly questions Google stopped asking potential employees

Published Jul 9th, 2014 3:05PM EDT
Silly Google Employees Interview Questions

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For some people, working at Google is a dream job — but getting there isn’t easy. Google has some very interesting hiring practices meant to ensure only the most successful candidates get in the door, including some questions that may seem out of this world, yet Google wants candidates to answer. Business Insider has put together a collection of 17 ridiculous questions Google used to ask interviewees, and they were taken from an extensive collection of 140 questions Google used to ask clients of Seattle job coach Lewis Lin in recent years.

Google would ask candidates to design an evacuation plan for San Francisco, explain the significance of “dead beef,” calculate how many golf balls can fit in a school bus, and figure out how much they’d charge to wash all the windows in Seattle.

But there are even stranger tasks than that, such as explaining to an 8-year old in three sentences what a database is or why a man lost his fortune after he pushed his car to a hotel.

One interesting challenge asks candidates to figure out what happens in a village of 100 married couples where every man has cheated on his wife, and every woman instantly knows when a man other than her own husband has cheated, when the queen arrives saying that at least one husband has been unfaithful – upon finding out her husband has been unfaithful, any wife must kill the man on the spot that very day.

To check out the full list of silly, but important, Google questions the company is now banned from asking potential employees, as well as solutions for them, see the source links at the end of the post.

Chris Smith Senior Writer

Chris Smith has been covering consumer electronics ever since the iPhone revolutionized the industry in 2008. When he’s not writing about the most recent tech news for BGR, he brings his entertainment expertise to Marvel’s Cinematic Universe and other blockbuster franchises.

Outside of work, you’ll catch him streaming almost every new movie and TV show release as soon as it's available.