With unemployment figures hitting a 17-year high at 2.64 million in the UK, what lengths would you go to to get a job?
Google makes its new employees jump through some extraordinarily complex hoops to land a pay packet from the company, according to reports across the web.
A company like Google, despite recent negative press from past employees, is still highly esteemed and tops the most wanted lists for graduates.
There are roles available for a Google doodler, communications director, software engineer and more at Google in the UK and in Palo Alto.
As you might imagine, Google has the pick of top graduates when it comes to employees, so the company developed a now famous range of outrageously complicated interview questions to test for the best.
So what's it like to go for a job at Google? Alyson Shontell, Business Insider start-ups reporter, who interviewed for Google before her current post, says she was "pelted with mind-numbing teasers" during her "nightmare" Google interview process.
Recruitment agents have also stepped up with tales of woe from their clients. Impact Interview has posted lists of questions that their clients have been asked when sitting a Google job interview.
Impact Interview's encyclopaedic list of 140 weird Google questions includes pearlers like the following:
You are given two eggs. You have access to a 100-storey building. Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-storey building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break two eggs in the process.
and
Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organise your shirts for easy retrieval?
And those questions were apparently just to find out if you would make a good Google software engineer.
Sadly for fans of surreal bureaucracy, but gladly for future Google interviewees, Google has now banned some of its more far-out questions, for being, well, too far out.
Gayle Laakmann McDowell, a former Google software engineer, member of the hiring committee and author of The Google Resume, says the silly questions have now been banned.
McDowell told Business Insider: "If an interviewer were to ask a candidate a brain teaser, despite the policy, the hiring committee would likely disregard this interviewer’s feedback and send a note back telling the interviewer not to ask such silly questions."
Google was contacted for comment, but does not discuss its recruitment process.
Check through the list of Google interview questions below. Can you tell which are banned and which ones are real?
CORRECTION: This article previously referred to Gayle Lasskmann McDowell as a recruiter. That has been corrected to "member of the hiring committee".