The senior vice president of people operations at Google says that the brainteasers it infamously posed to jobseekers at interview have been done away with because they were “a complete waste of time”.

Laszlo Bock, giving an interview to the New York Times, says that questions such as ‘How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane?’ or ‘How many gas stations in Manhattan?’ simply “don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart”.

“Instead, what works well are structured behavioural interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up,” he says.

This means behavioural interviewing has come to the fore, with questions such as ‘Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem’. Bock says this allows the interviewer “see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation”, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.

Earlier this week, recruiter.co.uk reported a list of 25 of the toughest and most unusual questions asked by companies at interview, which included ‘How do you fit a giraffe in a fridge?’ – asked at UPS to a sales trading candidate – and ‘Why is 99% not good enough?’ – asked at Parcelforce Worldwide to a delivery & collection manager candidate.

The list was compiled by online careers community Glassdoor, which features profiles of individual companies including questions asked in the recruitment process – click for Google's company profile.