Lots of press releases drop into my e-mail each day, and most are eminently forgettable (Dear PR people: There is a lesson for you here …), but once in a while, one jumps out and offers up some great fodder for this blog, usually because they get into something incredibly dumb, ridiculous or both.

This one hits on both of those counts. It touts the thoughts of the director of an MBA program at a large university in the Northeast and the “trend” that “more and more business are utilizing ‘unusual’ questions as part of their interview process.”

“While we’ve all heard stories of the Microsoft interview questions (Why is a manhole cover round? etc.), more employers are using non-standard questions in their interviews,” the release states.

Although the press release is just flat wrong about the notion that non-standard interview questions are a new “trend”—I saw colleagues using them in the hiring process more than 20 years ago—that’s not what caught my eye. What grabbed me were the interview questions that were identified by this MBA program director as “actual tough/unusual interview questions.” Here are a few of the more ridiculous ones:

• If you were a type of food, what type of food would you be?

• If you could compare yourself with any animal, which would it be and why?

• If you were a car, what type would you be?

• If you could be a superhero, what would you want your superpowers to be?

What kind of useful information could an interviewer possibly learn from a candidate by asking nutty questions like these? For example, the superhero question presupposes that everyone has a deep knowledge about the pantheon of superheroes and their unique qualities, and that’s a highly doubtful premise at best. On top of that, what kind of insight into a person are you going to get if they say if they would rather be the Human Torch than be Plastic Man? I can hardly imagine a serious interviewer listening to something like that with a straight face.

If you want to really find out more about a candidate, forget what kind of car a person thinks they would be and focus instead on behavioral questions that can really offer some insight into what kind of an employee they might be. This is what smart interviewers do, and questions that speak to a person’s behavior and how they might actually function in your organization not only give you a better read on the candidate, but also act as an effective predictor of future success on the job.

To be fair to the MBA program director being touted in the press release, that person also advises using behavioral interview questions to assess job candidates, but sadly, the focus on assessing a candidate’s behavior comes well after the list of goofy questions.

For my money, behavioral questions are the way to go, but really, don’t most interviewers make up their mind on a job candidate in the first two minutes of the interview? I’m not making a case for doing that, but really, I think it is a better indicator than forcing somebody hunting for work to have to prattle on about why they would like to be Wonder Woman.