Adam Maguire

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.

Candidates would be asked to estimate how many golf balls fit in the school bus, how many times a day clock hands overlap, or work out how many piano tuners there were in the world.

Or there'd be one where they'd say, you've been shrunk to the size of a paperclip, you're in a blender, it's going to be turned on in 10 seconds, what do you do?

It should be said, though, they've pretty much abandoned all of these quirky questions because they found they didn't actually help them find better candidates.

Yeah, it's an approach some companies now are opting to take in recent years.

John Lewis says it's doing so to give everyone a fair shot because not everyone will have the same training or experience when it comes to traditional interviews.

Not everyone will have the same opportunity to prepare.

Some will simply struggle with that artificial environment of an interview.

So they say by telling everyone what they're going to be asked, they feel they'll actually get a better idea of the candidate and what they are as a person.