Interview Questions from Left Field

Potential employers enjoy asking MBA applicants some off-the-wall questions. Here's how to not get rattled

In May, Jon Borden, a second-year MBA student from Northeastern University, interviewed at Blue Cross Blue Shield for a position as an IT recruiter. When he arrived for the interview, he was as well-prepared as he believed he could be. Because the position he was interviewing for required an almost immediate start date, he figured the interview would be quick and to the point.

It wasn't long into the meeting, however, before Borden was faced with a question unlike any other he had ever encountered in an interview: "If you could have any superpower, what would it be?"

"I was shocked," he admits. Even though Borden himself used to ask unexpected questions during interviews as an IT recruiter at Addeco ( ADO), he admits being caught off guard: "I didn't see that coming at all."

Manhole Cover Puzzle

While not a new trend, asking seemingly unrelated or impossible-to-answer questions aimed at throwing candidates for a loop seems to have turned from an uncommon interview tactic into something much more mainstream, says Lynne Sarikas, director of Northeastern's MBA Career Center. "This is something Microsoft ( MSFT) popularized a few years ago," Sarikas says. "They were notorious for asking strange questions like, Why is a manhole cover round?'"

Sarikas explains that much of the reason certain interviewers ask unpredictable questions is to catch candidates in an unguarded moment. "To some degree, it's a response to candidates being too prepared," she says. "These days, you're dead in the water if you're not prepared because companies expect you to be."

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