7 intense interview Qs Google had to stop asking candidates

Silicon Valley tech firms are renowned for their unique, if not off-kilter, hiring practises – weeding out the candidates they want from those they don’t.

To get the right hires, Elon Musk, Founder of SpaceX and Tesla, historically relied upon an abstract geographical question, asking interviewees: “You're standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?”

These kinds of puzzle-like questions earned the tech pioneers a cult following but some software giants, including Google and Musk, have since updated their hiring processes to something more usual.

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The Tesla boss now queries candidates on how they’ve reacted to conundrums in their life, requiring those that make it to interview to “tell [him] the story of their life, and the decisions that they made along the way, and why they made them."