Nine Never-Before Posed Job Interview Questions

1. “Hey did you catch Outsourced last night?”

2. “Spittoon? Lip balm? Éclair?”

3. “I’d like you to think back to a time, to a situation, I guess, in a prior job, when you were having an absolutely ordinary day, relatively speaking and addressing mundane job tasks, and—take a minute or two if you need to, here—thinking back, on a sort of average, uneventful day like that one, did you ever imagine that or maybe wonder if, in the future, you would find yourself put on the spot in an interview for a new position because every day, pretty much, was average and uneventful and lacking a significant accomplishment or situation that could be exploited or leveraged for the purposes of wowing would-be employers?”

4. “Somewhere in the bowels of my BMW, there’s this quarter—just an ordinary quarter, nothing precious or collectible—and in my mind, I’m flipping it, but what I want to know is, which year would you guess it was minted if you had to guess?”

5. “If you were offered this position right now and accepted it, how many hours would pass before you started spending enormous amounts of money you hadn’t earned yet?”

6. “Does it unsettle you to realize that all of your interviewers today could, chronologically speaking, be your younger siblings or cousins?”

7. “My last few questions relate to grant writing—your experience with the ins and outs of grant writing in particular—even though I knew full well and it was made emphatically clear to me, from our pre-interview chat a few weeks ago, from conferring with the recruiter who’s assisting us, and from scanning your resume, that you lacked any prior grant writing experience. Knowing that I know that you know that I know that you quietly resent this redundant line of questioning, given all that, how much scrilla do you think I’m pulling for conducting this half-assed hour-long interview?”

8. “If I got locked up and sentenced to a quarter century, could I count on you to be there to support me mentally? ”

9. “So like are you holding?”