Do curveball questions really get the best out of candidates?

Jo Faragher

If you fancy trying something different with candidates this week, video recruitment specialists Foosle have created a ‘curveball question generator’ which will ask anything from ‘How do you get a submarine into a car boot?’ to ‘If you were a piece of stationery, what would you do differently?’

It’s created the generator in conjunction with releasing some research, revealing that more than half of recruiters like to use unconventional interview questions to get candidates to think on their feet. Jobseekers in London are more likely to face a tough one: employers in the capital emerged as the most challenging when it came to ‘outside the box’ questioning strategies.

But what does this actually achieve? Even search engine giant Google has stopped using its famous ‘If you were a nickel and you fell into a blender, how would you get out?’ question because hiring managers realized they’d be more likely to get someone with the right skills and experience if they asked about just that – their skills and experience.

Online storage company Dropbox realised the same thing, and also noted that in its bid to be quirky, questions such as ‘What would you do if there was a zombie apocalypse?’ were actually putting off female candidates. Alienating half of your potential talent pool is never a great attraction strategy. (Interestingly, Foosle found that male recruiters were much more likely to throw a curveball, with 61% of men likely to ask such a question.)

And who can forget the electrical retailer that asked candidates to dance like David Brent? The issue is, that while these approaches can be helpful in that they get potential recruits to think on their feet, they will always appeal more to extroverted candidates, when perhaps hiring some people who are more reflective would help to create a more diverse team.

As a recruiter, if your client decides they want to inject something unusual into the hiring process, that’s entirely up to them. Your job as an intermediary is to get to know the candidate and what they have to offer as closely as possible. And while the odd curveball question will show you a bit more of their personality, the questions that will help you make that placement won’t involve blenders or zombies.