Another addition to the killer interview questions collection: How many dollars’ worth of hamburgers are sold in China each day?
Hamburgers picture from Shutterstock
Applied Predictive Technologies CEO Anthony Bruce tells Business Insider he favours this question as a means of testing a candidate’s analytical skills. The point is not to come up with the actual answer, but to explain the factors you would need to consider (how often hamburgers would be eaten, how that might vary between rural and urban areas, and how much they would sell for).
The obvious smart-aleck answer is “I would use Google to find out”, but that’s not likely to get you very far, since the data either may not exist online or may only be in a language you don’t understand. (If Mandarin is one of your skills, then by all means bring that up).
How would you answer the question?
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15 responses to “Killer Interview Question: How Many Dollars’ Worth Of Hamburgers Are Sold In China Each Day?”
Last time I checked, dollars was not the currency in China.
I’m going to go with $0.00
… which might not work out well for you because the question was “how many dollars’ *worth*”, clearly indicating that you will need to make some kind of conversation in the process.
the better route to be a smart smart-ass would have been better to take issue with the fact that there are numerous dollars” currencies – Singapore is geographically closest, while US dollars are the generally accepted global currency, however the question was posed in Australia.
already winning before even getting into the intended scope of the question
There are some tourist areas that do accept US dollars. There may be a few airport-based places such as Hong Kong that may actually accept dollars.
as it is a joke question, would reply with something along the lines of
well, lets take the square root of 4.62 and multiply it by 2 billion, then make an allowance of poor people calling it P and people that are over 2 km/s from a mcdonalds calling that O
your answer is 26.8 million.
I’ll need two return tickets (first class) to China plus $500,000 research money. I’ll have the answer for you in a few weeks or so.
They eat hamburgers in China?!
none, China uses Renminbi not Dollars
Stupid question. I would answer by pointing out the lack of relevance to anything based in reality outside of McDonalds.
You can Google for it, even if the answer isn’t in English Google will translate it for you.
But yeah, kind of a silly question that is obviously loaded.
The same answer as for how many iPhones were sold in China. More were sold than were sold 10 years ago.
It is a growth market.
oooh, nice answer if you’re going for a marketing job
Beef burgers aren’t big in china. They like their chicken and sweet corn more. next question.
None of these interview questions are “killer”. They won’t tell you anything more about a person than you can find out with non-novelty strategic questioning. HR is more an art than a science, let’s face it. These annoying questions just give employers a false impression that they somehow have an ‘inside track’. I can’t help but feel that in a way it’s just taking the piss out of the applicant who’s invested their time and effort to get there in the first place, only to be met with these pseudo insigtful questions that are no better than those facebook truisms that people constantly repost.
32. But they’re working on it.
I’d ask back..
Does this company sell burgers in China or is planning to sell burgers in China?
if the answer is ‘No’… then my response is ‘Who cares?”
Yeah, I’m not very good at job interviews. I’ve gotten every single job I’ve ever had through central govt. staffing (education dept.) , being there in the right place at the right time (cold calling my resume at Greater Union for a Cinema Usher – and getting lucky that the previous usher had just got the sack an hour before), or through friends and contacts (freelance graphic work)