An American science writer is set to release a book, in which he enlists all sorts of tricky questions, riddles and several devious interviewing techniques that would enable one to land a job at Google, as well as possibly anywhere in the United States.

William Poundstone, author of the new book, " Are you Smart Enough To Work At Google?" says that interviewers while recruiting today ask more bizarre and vague questions such as 'Can you swim faster in water or in syrup?' or 'How would you weigh your head?' than normal questions pertaining to the job.

The reason Poundstone says he's offering this guide is because firstly "there are more people than there are jobs and a potential employer can set the bar to entry high and still be assured of a waiting room full of desperate souls". Second, "HR departments are running scared, asking themselves 'How can we make sure our questions have predictive power for how well someone will do on the job?'" he says.

Many of Google's questions, says Poundstone, are intentionally open-ended. Example: 'How would you devise an evacuation plan for San Francisco?' In most instances, there is no single correct answer. The interviewer's goal is to see how the thinking process of the applicant works, and to gauge his or her creativity in problem-solving, the report said.

The book's most useful features include A Field Guide to Devious Interview Questions, which divides questions into categories (e.g., classic logic puzzles, lateral thinking puzzles, insight questions, tests of divergent thinking, etc.), then offers strategies and tips for answering each type, it added.

Interviewers at Google invest effort in coming up with ever-newer and more-devious questions. It's, therefore, more valuable for the applicant to understand the strategy for answering a given type of question than to have a canned answer ready, Poundstone concluded.

(Read by Brian Salter. Brian Salter is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)