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These are the 20 toughest UK job interview questions, and the companies who asked them

Charlie Benson
Content Marketing Executive

"What on your CV is the closest thing to a lie?" 

There are some interview questions you just can't anticipate and that candidates would definitely rather not come up against. 

But when you've got an interview coming up - you should factor curveball questions into your preparation. Though you can't prepare specifically for every bizarre question that may be thrown at you, you can practise answering tricky questions to get used to the sort of thinking that may be required of you by an interviewer. 

To help minimise your chances of being thrown off by a hard question, Glassdoor evaluated tens of thousands of interview questions shared by UK job candidates on their site over a 12-month period. Using community feedback on the difficulty of each question, they found the 20 companies and job roles that come with the most challenging interview questions. 

 

How well can you answer the UK's toughest interview questions? Find out below.

 

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Here are the 20 UK jobs that come with the toughest questions at interview: 

 

1. "What on your CV is the closest thing to a lie?"

- Marketing and Communications Employee, The Phoenix Partnership 

 

2. "What am I thinking right now?"

- Regional Director, TES Global 

 

3. "How would your enemy describe you?"

- Advertising Sales Grad Scheme, Condé Nast 

 

4. "If you had a friend who was great for a job and an identical person who was just as good, but your friend earned you £2,000 less, who would you give the job to?"

- Associate Recruitment Consultant, Hays plc 

 

5. "What's the most selfish thing you've ever done?"

- Graduate Consultant, PageGroup 

 

6. "You are stranded on the moon with a group of other astronauts and you need to travel 200 miles back to base, here is a list of 15 items salvaged from the wreckage of the spacecraft you were travelling in. List them in order of importance."

- Sales Employee, Turnstone Sales 

 

7. "If your best friend was here what advice would he give you?"

- Central Clearing Counterparty, American Express 

 

8. "Describe your biggest weakness. Then describe another."

- Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Palantir Technologies 

 

9. "How do you cope with repetition?"

- Product Specialist, Tesla Motors 

 

10. "How would you describe cloud computing to a 7-year-old?"

- Graduate Scheme, Microsoft 

 

11. "There are three people, each with different salaries, and they want to find an average of them without telling any of the other two their salary. How do they do it?"

- Technical Delivery Graduate, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence  

 

12. "Who is your hero, and why?"

- Product Quality Employee, GE 

 

13. "What's your biggest regret managing people so far?"

- Area Director, Regus 

 

14. "What would you ask the CEO if you met him one day?"

- Performance Analyst, British Airways 

 

15. "You have 50 red and 50 blue objects. Split these however you like between two containers to give the minimum/maximum probability of drawing one of the colours."

- Operations Analyst, Clearwater Analytics  

 

16. "What does social justice mean to you?"

- Content Marketing Manager, ThoughtWorks  

 

17. "What is your coping mechanism when you have a bad day?"

- Consultant, Switch Consulting 

 

18. "Are you a nice guy?"

- Product Manager, Badoo 

 

19. "Provide an estimate for the number of goals in the Premier League."

- Management Accountant, VAX

 

20. "Tell me about your childhood."

- Learning and Development Employee, Next 

 

 

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