The New York Times runs several puzzles, of which the easiest to solve on a computer must be “Spelling Bee.” Here’s a copy of one puzzle, along with instructions.

puzzle

We can solve this puzzle with one command!

grep -E '^[abcdkor]{5,}$' /usr/share/dict/words | grep 'a'

I omitted the -i flag to avoid matching on proper nouns. With variations on this command, we can find the three point words:

backboard  
backdoor  
corkboard  
rackboard

I haven’t turned this into a phone screen question, but it has some good ingredients.