Last month, The New York Times ran an article on questions posed to business school graduates by investment banking firm recruiters. The questions were designed more to gauge applicants’ reactions than test their knowledge. They ranged from the unknowable (“How many gas stations are in the United States?”) to those requiring lateral thinking (“If you could stack up enough pennies to reach the top of the Empire State Building, could you fit them all into a room?”).
They also included some personality-determining brain teasers, such as “How much would you pay to play the coin-toss game?” and “What is the most controversial belief you hold?”
My own answers to the above are, respectively, “Irrelevant: Only six will give you the key to the men’s room”; “Maybe not in this room, but in the office I ultimately aspire to, quite easily”; and “Fifty bucks. Right now.” (I own a double-headed quarter, which I plan on carrying should I ever have an interview with an investment banking firm.)
As for the “controversial belief” question, my answer would be “I believe questions like that should not be illegal under the EEOC. Pity they are. When do I start?”
These questions, quite frankly, are dumb. But the idea is intriguing. What might a potential DM employer ask job candidates to gain insight into their thinking?
Some suggestions:
- What two-word search engine phrase best describes you, and how much — per click — would you be willing to bid for it?
- Within a 10-year period, a customer receives enough catalogs to cover the entire Great Wall of China in papier-m
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