Brainteaser interview questions such as ‘How many cars are there in Shanghai?’ and ‘Estimate the annual turnover of a typical supermarket in Paris’ are used by some interviewers supposedly to test candidates’ critical thinking abilities. However, employer data suggests that such questions do not reliably measure job-related skills.
Famously, in 2013 Laszlo Bock, the then senior vice president of people operations at Google, remarked on the company’s data relating to such questions. ‘On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time,’ he said. ‘They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.’
Interviewers who scored higher on narcissism and sadism were somewhat more likely to ask brainteasers
In a recent study led by Bowling Green State University’s Scott Highhouse, psychologists surveyed respondents about their likelihood of asking brainteasers as opposed to questions that were either more traditional (eg ‘Why should we hire you?’) or behavioural (eg ‘Tell me about a time that you helped someone’). They also completed personality tests. Analyses found that interviewers who scored higher on narcissism (excessive self-admiration and belief in one’s superiority) and sadism (the tendency to derive enjoyment from others’ misery) were somewhat more likely to ask brainteasers.
So, be careful when you are looking for work. Given that brainteasers are typically poor tests of job performance, consider the possibility that an interviewer using them – potentially your future line manager – may score higher on narcissism and sadism.
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