Q: “How would you price a teleportation device?”
A: “Uhh…”
One of us went through management consulting interviews coming out of undergrad, which meant we were frequently subjected to questions like these. The case interview process is its own genre. You’d get a business situation, limited information, and an interviewer watching you think through a problem in real time. Such as “What’s the size of the tire market for passenger vehicles in the US” or “Our client is a regional airline losing money, what do you do?”. Sometimes you’d just get a straight brainteaser.
One of our favorites:
You have two jars each with 100 white beads and black beads. Arrange the beads however you want between the jars. Someone will then pick up a jar at random, shake it up, and draw one bead at random. How do you maximize the chance they draw a black bead?
The trick is realizing nobody said the jars had to be balanced and that they can fit more than 100 beads each. Put a single black bead alone in the first jar, and everything else in the second. Now half the time they pick the first jar and draw a black bead with certainty, and half the time they pick the second jar where the odds are just under half. You end up around 75%. The answer isn’t a formula. It’s noticing the constraint you invented in your head was never actually there.
Back to the teleportation device… how would you price it? There’s no right answer, which is sort of the point. Do you anchor to what it replaces (a first-class flight?). Or do you price based on the value it drives (what would an executive at a global company pay to be anywhere in the world each day and home for dinner?). These questions had almost nothing to do with the actual job. No client ever asked us to price a teleportation device. Nobody at any engagement ever handed us jars of beads. And the firms knew that. The questions were never about the content. They were about watching how someone approaches a problem they’ve never seen before. Do they panic or get curious? Do they structure it or flail? Do they state their assumptions or hide them? Do they notice the invented constraint?
Every interview process is trying to solve the same problem those firms were: the polished surface doesn’t tell you what you are actually looking to learn. Candidates arrive with rehearsed stories and increasingly, AI-assisted everything. What you actually need to know is how this person behaves when they hit something they haven’t prepared for, because that’s most of what many jobs are.
We don’t think the fix is weaving brainteasers into your process. We’ve written before about probing how candidates react when the process doesn’t cover the situation, and our advice is a version of that: build your interview around a small, real problem from the actual role. The messy customer email. The production schedule that doesn’t add up. The machine that isn’t working. Then do what those consulting interviewers did well, which is watch the approach, not the answer. Let the candidate ask questions. Give them incomplete information on purpose and see if they notice. You’ll learn more from ten minutes of that than from an hour of “tell me about a time.”
The teleportation question was a strange way to get there. But the thing it was reaching for is the thing every good interview is reaching for: not what someone knows, but how they think when they don’t.
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team