If You Were a Font, What Would You Be? Wildcard Interview Questions

WHAT! “If you were a font, what would you be?” What kind of question is this? I look at these questions and sometimes just scratch my head. Have you been hit with one of these goof ball questions during an interview? Well I have. In fact, the above question was asked to applicants wanting to response to a job recently posted by a local company for an HR Director position.

These types of interview questions are sometimes called Wildcard questions or Off-The-Wall questions. The use of these oddball questions are even growing in popularity. As an HR professional, I never have been a subscriber to using these types of questions in the interview process. However, I have used them as icebreaker questions during workshops, staff offsites, and at parties when the conversation has stalled.

Over the years I have personally encountered some of these parlor-trick types of interview questions. Some were humorous or bizarre and others were just downright obnoxious. One time, right after I graduated from college, I interviewed with a company that asked a question in a written personality assessment that still ranks up there as one of the most bizarre questions ever. I kid you not, the question was: “Do you urinate in the shower when you are showering?” Obviously I didn’t work for that company.

The question that really comes to mind in asking one of these questions is: What is the interviewer going to learn from the answer? There has to be a value from the answer you receive from the candidate. What is that value? These types of questions are frequently used to break the rhythm of a well rehearsed candidate. Good candidates will prepare themselves before the interview by reviewing answers to possible questions. They also are supposed to give an insight into your reasoning skills and/or creativity. It is more about how you came about your answer than the answer itself. While it is said that there is no right or wrong answer to these types of questions, there are definitely better ways to answer these types of questions over other ways. If you get asked a wild card question, stay calm, think through your answer and reveal your reasons for the answer or the process you used to come to that conclusion.

I was discussing this title question about fonts to an HR colleague. We joked around about writing the whole cover letter in MT Extra, the symbols font (unfortunately this blog site does have it as a font option). It shows a little creativity, humor and problem solving. Problem solving on the part of the screener as he or she would need to figure out the in-joke. Basically, it is a little of the back at you mister/miss screener. However, I would suspect it likely might be viewed as a damaged or corrupted file when opened and just thrown out.

I did an internet search on these questions and found a couple of good articles that I thought I would share them with you. The first article has a laundry list of all the various oddball questions, the reasoning behind each question and suggested ways to answers them. It includes a good video clip on the “do’s and don’ts” to answering “Guestimation” questions. It also includes a Monty Python clip on interviews, which in my book, is worth the price of admission. http://hubpages.com/hub/Off-The-Wall The second article gives more rationalization behind these questions. In the article they share the response of a candidate that was faced with this question: “If aliens landed in front of you and, in exchange for anything you desire, offered you any position on their planet, what would you want?" The candidate’s first response was clever and just downright perfect. At the end of the article you can go and answer 20 wildcard questions and submit them for evaluation. http://www.quintcareers.com/wild_card_interview_questions.html

So, what was the most off-the-wall question you have ever faced in an interview? I would love to hear what it was and how you responded.