How to Respond to Odd Interview Questions

Sometimes interviewers do ask odd, inappropriate, or even illegal interview question like:

“How old are you?”
“Are you married?”
“Do you have children?”
“Do you have a stable personal life?”

These questions are not related to the job for which you are applying, but they do have a purpose to ask, they want to figure out something on you. So that it’s up to you to figure out and address their true concern.

For example, when an interviewer asks “Do you have a stable personal life?”, he or she is trying to protect the company from a bad situation that they’ve had to deal with in the past, such as an former employee’s personal problems interfered with the person’s ability to do the job. In this case the interviewer really wants to know is, will you be a reliable employee who can be counted upon to show up and do your job effectively, regardless of any personal problems you may have.

You have several choices to address odd interview questions:

You can simply say, “You can’t ask me that! It’s an inappropriate question!” then You have little chance to get job. So don’t this.

A smart choice to answer the question. Even if it’s wrong to ask, there’s nothing wrong with answering it. You should realize that answering personal questions may harm your chance of getting the job if what you are giving is not what they want to answer, but that is not worse than not answering the question.

For questions about your personal life, you can just give the positive aspects no matter what happened before. For instance, to answer “Do you have a stable personal life?”, say something like:

“Yes, I have a very stable personal life and I don’t foresee any changes in that regard. My career is important to me and my family is very supportive. There won’t be any
distractions affecting my work performance.”

An alternative to this type of questions is to ask a question back, ask for clarifying their concerns:

“How would my answer to that question directly relate to my ability to perform in this position?”

“Could you please rephrase or elaborate on your question? I want to make sure I address your concern.”