Slashdot Mirror
The Gamification of Hiring
First time accepted submitter funge writes "The Economist has an article on Work and play: The gamification of hiring about a start-up that lets you play games to show off your talents to prospective employers. From the article: 'The rules of Happy Hour are deceptively simple. You are a bartender. Your challenge is to tell what sort of drink each of a swelling mob of customers wants by the expressions on their faces. Then you must make and serve each drink and wash each used glass, all within a short period of time. Play this video game well and you might win a tantalizing prize: a job in the real world.'"
In other words someone watched The Last Starfighter. Not exactly a new concept.
Demand on their time. When twenty people apply for a job, you can interview them all. When a hundred apply, you have to start examining CVs. But now, thanks to the internet, it's routine to get thousands of people apply for one job. What is an employer to do? They need some way to streamline the evaluation process. Games are another attempt to solve this problem. Many still rely on the simplist possible method though: Grab half the pile of applications and throw them straight in the bin, because there just isn't time to read so many.
I never interview 20 people for a vacancy. I never interview more than 5, and I try to keep it to 3. It's simple to narrow down the field of applications. Our typical announcement will say something like,"Submit cover letter, completed application, resume, and three letters of reference before 3 pm Friday, June 25." Somewhere between 40-60% will fail to have all of those, and they go immediately to the reject pile. If I still have a huge pile, the next sort is made on some relevant criterion. We might have said, "College degree in Industrial Hygiene or related field preferred." If it's an entry level position, I cull out those without a degree. Then I read cover letters. Can you communicate clearly in standard, written English. Spelling errors are fatal. If you don't care enough to press F7, you don't care enough to be trusted with our work product. Now I'm down to a manageable group, which I score on a matrix. Usually there will be a clearly defined top group of 2-5, which I interview. The interview is almost all about how the person will fit into our group, because the finalists can pretty much all do the job. If not, we go back through the pole or go out again. I learned long ago that the wrong hire is hugely worse than an empty chair.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.