Are You Smart Enough To Work At Google?

A book is set to release in which all sorts of tricky questions, riddles and several devious interviewing techniques are enlisted that would enable one to land a job at Google. William Poundstone, author of the new book, "Are you Smart Enough To Work At Google?" says that interviewers while recruiting today ask more bizarre and vague questions such as 'Can you swim faster in water or in syrup?' or 'How would you weigh your head?' than normal questions pertaining to the job.

And therefore, with his book, he is ready to answer 'Trick Questions, Zen-like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You Need to Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy,' as the book's subtitle read, ABC News reports.

The reason Poundstone says he's offering this guide is because firstly "there are more people than there are jobs and a potential employer can set the bar to entry high and still be assured of a waiting room full of desperate souls". Second, "HR departments are running scared, asking themselves 'How can we make sure our questions have predictive power for how well someone will do on the job?'" he says.

Many of Google's questions, says Poundstone, are intentionally open-ended. Example: 'How would you devise an evacuation plan for San Francisco?' In most instances, there is no single correct answer. The interviewer's goal is to see how the thinking process of the applicant works, and to gauge his or her creativity in problem-solving, the report said.

The book's most useful features include A Field Guide to Devious Interview Questions, which divides questions into categories (e.g., classic logic puzzles, lateral thinking puzzles, insight questions, tests of divergent thinking, etc.), then offers strategies and tips for answering each type, it added.

Interviewers at Google invest effort in coming up with ever-newer and more-devious questions. It's, therefore, more valuable for the applicant to understand the strategy for answering a given type of question than to have a canned answer ready, Poundstone concluded.

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Source-ANI