Can You Solve These 3 Fiendish Recruitment Puzzles?

The ‘recruitment puzzle’ is as old as time. As well as providing good material for marketing and branding campaigns and often going viral online, these conundrums help large companies narrow down a huge graduate applicant pool to a select few.

Here are three of the most compelling recruitment challenges from the past year. Can you crack them?

Google has always been king of riddle recruitment – and its methods of delivering puzzles can, in turn, be puzzling. In 2015, a coder Googled the words ‘python lambda function list comprehension’. The search engine served him up a message: “You’re speaking our language. Up for a challenge?”

After the coder solved the following conundrum, Google invited him to submit his CV. He was offered a job at the tech powerhouse three months later.

This year, another Google puzzle for candidates was released to the press. Dubbed “The 100 Hat Riddle”, it challenged budding Google employees to prove their problem-solving abilities. Here’s the scenario:

1. 100 prisoners are lined up, all facing the same way, so that each prisoner is looking at the back of the one in front of them.
2. Each prisoner is given a hat to wear that is either blue or red, although they are not told which.
3. Every prisoner can see all of the prisoners, and thus hats, that are in front of them. They cannot see their own hat or the hats of the prisoners behind.
4. Going from the back to the front, the prisoners are made to guess the color of their own hat: blue or red. If they get it right, they live. If they get it wrong, they die.
5. The prisoners are allowed to confer and discuss tactics before they are all lined up. 

What should the prisoners agree to do to ensure the most possible survive?

Check out this page for the answer.