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2016's toughest interview questions revealed

As a HR professional, recruiter, or hiring manager, you’ve probably lost count of the amount of interviews you’ve conducted. The number of questions you’ve had to come up with for those interviews is even higher, making it only logical that you eventually start to repeat yourself.

Of course, your candidates won’t notice you’re recycling questions, since they weren’t present at all the other interviews. However, to keep things interesting for yourself, and because the search for the perfect interview question is never over, it’s good to see what other questions are out there.

The team at Glassdoor went through thousands of interview questions as shared on the website by UK job candidates in the past year. Based on feedback from the online Glassdoor community, they established a list of the 20 hardest interview questions, as well as the job they could help land.

We’ve listed our ten favourites below.

  • "What on your CV is the closest thing to a lie?" —marketing and communications employee, The Phoenix Partnership  
  • "If you had a friend who was great for a job and an identical person who was just as good, but your friend earned you £2,000 less, who would you give the job to?" —associate recruitment consultant, Hays plc
  • "What’s the most selfish thing you’ve ever done?" —graduate consultant, PageGroup
  • "You are stranded on the moon with a group of other astronauts and you need to travel 200 miles back to base, here is a list of 15 items salvaged from the wreckage of the spacecraft you were travelling in. List them in order of importance." —sales employee, turnstone sales
  • "How do you cope with repetition?" —product specialist, Tesla Motors
  • "How would you describe cloud computing to a 7 year old?"—graduate scheme, Microsoft
  • "There are three people, each with different salaries, and they want to find the average of them without telling any of the other two their salary. How do they do it?"—technical delivery graduate, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence
  • "What's your the biggest regret managing people so far?" —area director, Regus
  • "What would you ask the CEO if you met him one day?" —performance analyst, british airways
  • "Tell me about your childhood." —learning and development employee, Next
ALSO READ: Top 12 most memorable interview mistakes

Photo / iStock

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