So you want a job – would you rather be an apple or a banana?

It is being called ‘‘extreme interviewing’’ – the new ordeals and interrogations devised by American employers to test potential workers in a jobs market tilted in favour of the bosses.

Newly empowered by the stubbornly high jobless rate, interviewers have turned to reality television, quiz shows and theatre auditions for ideas on how to find ideal staff. One ploy born of the recession is to invite two candidates to the same lunch to see how they each handle themselves.

Campbell Mithun, an advertising firm, requires job applications in the form of a series of 13 Twitter messages, a process it says is designed to find ‘‘digitally savvy, creative thought leaders’’.

According to a career website, Glassdoor, recruiters at a marketing group told applicants to ‘‘just entertain me for five minutes; I’m not going to talk’’.

Applicants for jobs pumping frozen yoghurt have been asked who they would have to dinner if they could choose any three people, living or dead.

Google receives a million job applications a year and hires only one of every 130 people interviewed. Every candidate is said to be the subject of a 50-page dossier, detailing their academic, professional, and social history, as well as their overall ‘‘Googliness’’.

With 13 million Americans out of work, it can often seem that companies are putting jobseekers through the wringer simply because they can.

However, it has long been suspected that traditional interviews are not effective. In 1992, a Harvard experiment showed that people who saw 10-second clips of an interview had the same opinion of the interviewee as the interviewer, suggesting that it all rests on first impressions.

In World War II, it was discovered that promising pilots could be identified by asking: ‘‘Have you ever built a model airplane that flew?’’

The most extreme interviews are probably held in Silicon Valley, where the questions often resemble surreal teasers, such as ‘‘Would you rather be an apple or a banana?’’

Google has asked applicants: ‘‘Why are manhole covers round?’’

One jobseeker on Glassdoor.com responded: ‘‘If they ask questions as stupid as this now, can you imagine what they’re going to ask you once you work for them?’’