Adam Maguire

from those members of staff as part of the interview process.

Erica Nardini, who's head of cooking website Food52, at the time, though, she did this interview with the New York Times.

She was the CEO of the popular sports media, Barstool Sports.

She said she liked to text candidates on the weekend to see how quickly they got back to her, which she said would tell her how committed they were to the job, even during their downtime.

And apparently within three hours was the acceptable metric for her, if you got back to her.

Must tell the boss, though.

Tech executive Trent Irons told a podcast he used what he calls the coffee cup test.

So he brings an interviewee to the kitchen before the interview, asks them if they want a cup of coffee.

Then he waits afterwards to see what they do with the cup after the interview.

So if they bring it back or try to bring it back to the kitchen, give it a rinse, that's a good sign.

If you leave it on the desk, you probably have a bad attitude as far as he's concerned.

And then, of course, there's the very real and present threat that, you know, interview companies are going to be scanning through social media history to get to know their candidates better.

I imagine most job applicants assume that's going to happen nowadays, even on lower level roles.

But some companies then getting very kind of, you know, out there with their formal interview processes, for example, the Wall Street Journal.

reported some candidates are being asked to work out with hiring managers rather than do a formal sit-down interview, which raises a lot of issues and questions for me.

But for a long time now, Google has been the king of the strange interview process.

I remember one from 2004.

They put up a billboard which just had first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of E in curly brackets and then .com at the end.

And the idea basically being you had to be smart enough to solve this equation to even get a chance to apply for an interview, because that was the website, whatevertheanswerwas.com.

At Google, also legendary for asking really strange questions that were designed to kind of test people's problem solving, their critical thinking skills.