Do Oddball Questions Help Companies Find the Best New Hires? Unlikely.

Which one of the seven dwarfs would you be?

Dismiss that question as silly at your peril. Because silly or not, such questions are increasingly common in job interviews. So common, in fact, that Don Zhang, an associate professor of industrial and organizational psychology at Louisiana State University, decided to examine how job candidates perceive these questions and the companies that ask them.

“In my research, I came across all these questions, and I thought, ‘What do companies think they are accomplishing when they ask these,’ and, ‘How would an applicant feel,’ ” says Zhang.

What he found was that companies might be better off cutting the quirky.

Horses vs. ducks

In one study, Zhang gave 275 participants with work experience one of four randomly assigned lists of questions. One was a list of traditional questions, such as, “Tell me about yourself,” which acted as a control group. The other three lists were made up of oddball questions, which he had found through books, blogs and online articles, that fell into one of three categories: preference-oriented questions, such as, “Would you rather be attacked by 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?”; open-ended questions, such as, “What would you do in the event of a zombie apocalypse?”; and biographical questions, such as, “What was the last costume you wore?’’

Participants were asked to judge the usefulness of specific questions for one of four job types (receptionist, marketing executive, software developer and janitor). They were then given various adjectives and asked to rate the likability and usefulness of such questions.

The participants judged the oddball questions to be roughly 30% more likable—that is, more fun, less boring and more interesting—compared with traditional interview questions. But they also judged them to be about 20% less useful (i.e. more inappropriate, unfair and invasive).

“Basically, they thought the questions were likable and fun, but not useful or fair in the hiring setting,” Zhang says.

In a second study, Zhang was interested in whether the personalities of the applicants affected how they viewed the organization asking the questions.

Zhang found that job seekers with a better sense of humor, according to the personality assessment, thought the oddball questions were more useful for organizations in a job-interview setting than those who didn’t share their goofiness. Those same candidates were also less anxious about the interviews.

“Another way to think about the results is that these types of offbeat questions act as a penalty against applicants who don’t have a sense of humor,” says Zhang. “But you can easily argue that a sense of humor isn’t required for most jobs.” And if an interview is making applicants who aren’t natural comics uncomfortable, that may be alienating top talent—making them less likely to want to work at the company.

The cool kids

Research has shown that people project symbolic personality traits onto organizations. “Walmart might be considered a traditional, conservative company, whereas Uber might be more stylistic,” says Zhang. “I think some companies use these oddball personality questions to stand out, to say ‘we are this cool company,’ but the practice could backfire.”

“You might be losing out on talent, and you’re not getting anything in return with these oddball questions that don’t assess job-relevant traits,” Zhang says. “They may be handicapping your hiring by including biases and judgment errors.”

If hiring managers really want to ask oddball personality questions to seem cool or fun, Zhang advises saving them for later parts of the recruitment process, ideally after an offer is made or the contract is signed. “Use them as an ice breaker or image tool, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the selection process,” he says. “That way, the risk of making applicants uncomfortable or turned off is no longer there, and you can reap the benefits, not the cost.”

And you can still find out what a new hire would do if they found a penguin in a freezer.

Heidi Mitchell is a writer in Chicago. She can be reached at [email protected].