important questions for prospective employees

Yesterday, I spent half the day interviewing four college students for a new position that's being created in my former department. Each candidate was to be asked each of the following three questions in separate interviews:

- A pond has lily pads on it. The number of lily pads doubles every day. If it takes 48 days to cover the entire pond, how many days does it take to cover half the pond?

- A boy paid $1.10 for a baseball bat and a baseball in a sporting goods store. If he paid $1 more for the bat than the ball, how much did he pay for the ball?

- It takes five machines five minutes to produce five widgets. If there are 100 machines, how long does it take them to produce 100 widgets?

I found this quite entertaining, since there has been little evidence to suggest that my former department has ever been interested in anyone's analytical capabilities in the past. The idea of "fit" has always appeared to be more important, despite the fact that the job requires people to perform analysis and run numbers all day long. Weird.

Based on this, I was able to have quite a bit of fun with the "widgets" question before the interviews started. One of the managers in the department got the question wrong, so I told her it didn't matter and that she should be focusing on other important matters with regards to widgets:

Did the machine get along well with other machines?
Did the machine aspire to be like other machines?
Did the machine have a good work/life balance?
Did the machine have experience motivating other machines if they weren't pulling their weight?
How would the machine resolve conflicts with more experienced machines?
In the event the machine's immediate supervising machine was out sick, could he cover for the supervising machine?
Was the machine ethnically diverse?
Was the machine a self-starter, or did he prefer to work from a task list?

...and so on. My facetious questions are exactly the kinds of questions that have been asked of candidates for years. It isn't any wonder to me that the department is currently facing serious difficulties with regards to mismanagement and a dearth of talent.

I wasn't able to attend the final debrief in order to hear what all of the other people conducting interviews thought of the candidates, but I sincerely hope they weren't putting too much weight on these questions. I think there are better ways to gauge a person's analytical skills than asking them brain teasers. Whatever the case, three of the four candidates got all three questions right. One of the candidates got all three wrong. I don't know if there is a correlation between their responses and our opinions, but the guy who got all three questions wrong also happened to be the candidate at the bottom of each of our lists. That said, my colleagues that I spoke to and I all agreed that we could hire all four, and that all four would probably do very well.

Leave a comment if you think you have the correct answer to the above questions (the serious questions). I'll post the answers later.