What is the strangest question you have been asked in a job interview?

Are you wearing your husband’s Phi Beta Kappa key?

I responded, “No. But I’m wearing his underwear.”

I didn’t get the job; he didn’t get a smart employee ;-) I have to say I was impressed that he recognized the pin; I was less impressed with his assholedom.

I was in an interview for a tech position in 1999. I thought I was doing good to have my resume reflecting 10 years of upward professional mobility with steadily increasing responsibility. The interviewer then asked me, “So, what happened over the previous ten years? Did you just fall out of the sky?”

It wasn’t in the interview but it was by the receptionist when I first walked in. She asked me what uniform I was wearing…. (meaning which airline uniform), ... I told her it wasn’t a uniform, but one of my own suits. Apparently, a woman wearing a suit of her own was a very strange concept in the antipodes. (I was interviewing for Qantas International in New Zealand).

“What was Kiri-Kin-Tha’s first law of metaphysics?”
I was shocked by the simplicity of that question.

I have only had one interview for the job I currently have and it was will you work for me. That was it.

But I once was interview by a cop that had pulled over my friend and when I got out of the car this shrimp Sergeant looks up at me and asked me “How come you are so tall and your friends are so small?” I wanted to say you mean like you?? But I wanted to sleep in my own bed that night.

Someone asked me if I was independently wealthy nobility because, he then explained, if that were so, he’d worry the money would not be something he could use for leverage. I told him the truth, and then explained that I thought that was a peculiar way of thinking, and that I was actually mainly interested in the interesting aspects of the work, in any case.

It worked out for a while, but eventually turned out there were deeper depths to his corruption. Interviews are often full of information about the issues of the employer.

We don’t have to take our clothes off, to have a good time, oh no, we can dance & party, all night & drink some cherry wine, uh-huh…na na nanananana na na…
Good song or annoying bollocks?

Religion wasn’t discussed when I was interviewed for an ad agency job years ago in Dallas but a few days after I was hired one of the owners took me to lunch and told me I was destined to to go to hell because I’m Jewish. He then assured me that he could help save me.

I quit that same day.

I worked for an accountant who was a real conspiracy theorist, it turned out. He didn’t really say anything at the interview but at a social function in the office one day he started telling us all how he KNEW the moon landing was a hoax. My days of taking anything he said seriously soon came to an end. He shared more stories like it so I started calling him Don Quixtoke and his wife who sat at reception was Sancho panza.

“It can be said that people are motivated by money, people or ideas. Which motivates you?”

“So, what are you actually doing with your masters degree?”

I interviewed for a position as supervisor over a psych unit for a national healthcare company in 2008. The HR person conducting the interview asked me if I had a Facebook account and that, if so, I would be required to hand over my password as a way for the company to assess whether I was the right person for the job. I’ve never had a Facebook account and never intend on getting one. But I was so incensed by this invasion of a job candidate’s privacy, that I told her that the people who executed this policy were loonier than the people they had in their psych units, then I walked out hoping that I’d made the interviewer question what she was doing for a living and maybe, in a small way, put a dent in this unconstitutional invasion of our private lives by the corporations we must work for in order to make a decent living.

@Espiritus_Corvus Good job! That IS loony.