Most job interviews are like fencing matches with Nerf swords. The interviewer fires up a softball question, the candidate responds with a canned answer. This continues until both people get so numb that they begin slamming their heads against the desk.

If they slam their heads in unison, the applicant gets hired. If not, hasta la vista.

All right, maybe it's a little more sophisticated than that, but the process is still dumb. Some interviewers will use behavioral questions -- such as, "Give me an example of how you dealt with a difficult customer" -- but those often show how well the applicant prepared for the interview rather than how talented the worker is.

As I've said before, companies rely too much on interviews rather than references, work samples and assigned tasks.

But good candidates still have to prepare themselves for anything, and one of the less-common twists that employers such as Microsoft use is to offer brain-teasing questions.

As John Kador explains in "How to Ace the Brainteaser Interview" (McGraw- Hill), "Interviewers look to brainteasers to do one thing: to start a safe conversation that reveals how smart candidates are."

He said high-tech companies in particular might use the questions because they realize that specific skills in their industry can get out of date quickly, so it's more important to hire quick-witted people.

Kador's book offers more than 150 questions and answers. Here are two questions I particularly liked (the answers are at the end):

-- Suppose you have a bunch of black and white socks in three drawers, labeled "white," "black" and "mixed," but you also know that all three labels are wrong. After picking one sock from one drawer, how can you change the labels so they will be correct?

-- It's a Friday afternoon, and you're a prisoner in solitary confinement serving a life sentence. How can you cajole a cigarette out of the guard?

The first question does have one right answer, but Kador explains that many questions are designed to measure creativity, logic or communication skills.

There is no one right way to get the cigarette from the guard, of course, but Kador did a contest on his Web site ( and got several creative answers.

A different sort of question in that vein might be: How much does the Washington Monument weigh?

You wouldn't be expected to know the answer, but the interviewer would be interested in how you make your guess.

Another question is: "Imagine I am blind. Describe blue to me."

Despite my concerns about job interviews, these questions are at least more intriguing.

None of these would be the sole basis of hiring someone, of course, but might help a boss decide among several stellar candidates.

If you get such a question, take a deep breath and think about it for a minute. Don't start babbling instantly because you're intimidated by the silence.

The winner would know that you grab a sock from the "mixed" drawer.

If it's black, for example, that means it's the black sock drawer, so the drawer mislabeled as "white" must have a mixture, and the one labeled as "black" must have only white socks.