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.'"

Comments

Dance, monkey, dance!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, WTF is wrong with employers these days??

Isn't it enough that I went to college and built a solid base of good work I can point to that shows I can do the job?

If you just want someone reliable who is quick to learn and gets things done, don't put me through the wringer like you're a Bachelorette holding out for Prince Charming!

Re:Dance, monkey, dance!

[The Mighty Buzzard]

Those who can, do. Those who can't, manage.

Re:Dance, monkey, dance!

[Dunbal]

When a hundred apply, you have to start examining CVs.

Of course there's another method: take 50 CV's from the pile and throw them in the trash, and tell yourself "there, I got rid of all the unlucky ones".

Re:Dance, monkey, dance!

[pitchpipe]

Seriously, WTF is wrong with employers these days??

It's corporatocracy at its finest. With fewer and fewer jobs, and more and more wealth being concentrated in the hands of the few, it is not surprising to see our corporate masters starting to act like the feudal lords of old. We are there for their entertainment.

Because corporations are gathering power over our lives that used to belong only to the government, we need a bill of rights that covers interactions between corporations and individuals, their 'corporations are citizens too' bullshit notwithstanding.

I, for one, do not welcome our corporate overlords.

Re:Dance, monkey, dance!

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

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.

Re:Dance, monkey, dance!

[PopeRatzo]

Because corporations are gathering power over our lives that used to belong only to the government, we need a bill of rights that covers interactions between corporations and individuals,

Corporations are gathering power over our lives that never belonged to the government.

There was actually a time when there was something of a balance between the aggregate of labor and the aggregate of capital. People like my grandfather got their heads bashed in so that future workers could have this balance, but an organized, systematic attack on workers' rights by an unholy alliance of the biggest corporations and the corporate royalist politicians like Ronald Reagan and Mitt Romney has created the arena-like atmosphere of today's workplace, where the question is not how small will my annual raise be, but how much of my compensation will I be required to give back to the employer. And those give-backs are certainly not because the corporations aren't profitable, in fact they are profitable at all-time historical levels. Rather those give-backs are meant to create greater separation between a self-appointed elite and the people who actually make the machines go. It wasn't the result of market forces that created this situation, it was the belief that money accumulated is morally superior to money earned. And that sociopathic worldview has destroyed families, communities and sickened society to the point of near collapse. The reason workers are making less, we are told by the likes of Mitt Romney, is because workers are not willing to make less. And tribalism is engaged in the most cynical ways to get people to stand up and demand to not get a pension, to demand to not have the right to collectively bargain, to demand not to be treated with respect. Meanwhile, the "capital management" elite are laughing up their shirtcuffs while voting each other obscene rewards.

And that balance between the power of capital and the power of labor was not only good for the union workers, but it was good for the entire economy, the entire culture. We had an unprecedented period of growth, where workers at all levels of society could have a small measure of dignity, and expectation of a little better life for their kids.

"Class warfare" they accuse, when any mention of their ugly willingness to break the social contract. "Class warfare!". They should only get a taste of real class warfare. Maybe that's the only thing that would make them re-think their destructive ways: actual class warfare. Because it makes one reconsider the errors of one's ways when the head of a colleague ends up on a pike.

Re:Dance, monkey, dance!

[PopeRatzo]

If it's any comfort to you, it usually ends with the elimination of some heads. It just takes time.

I know, but that's some cold comfort.

For me, I don't really care. My working life, my accumulating life is over. I've gotten to a point, by long design, where these things don't affect me so directly any more.

But I've got a kid, a daughter, who's just getting started in life. It burns me up that the world she's getting ready to take on is so hostile to the traditional values of love, family, integrity, fairness.

Because to the people in charge, "family values" means making sure that two gay guys can't get the same rights as my wife and me, but to me, "family values" means that a family can afford to send kids to school and get mom surgery if she needs it and maybe retire to a simple life of ease for a few years. "Family values" means that buying a home is more than the three-card monte game that the financial industry has made it. I was there the day my mom and dad burned their mortgage on a house my dad was able to buy after coming home from WWII. How many families ever get to a "mortgage burning" any more? How many people in their fifties or sixties ever see that kind of independence? And it's not by accident that the answer is "very few".

People want to talk about the "gamification" of the job market. How freaking insulting. Human beings take work seriously. The work they do is not just about bringing home a check. I don't care if you're a machinist like my dad or a garbage man or a computer programmer. Our elites have turned it all to shit, and now they want us to fix it all for them by working an extra five years of our lives and by sending our kids to trade school instead of university and by renting instead of buying.

I always go stop and stand around near my mom and dad's grave on memorial day. I look at the flag on my dad's headstone and the mention of "family and country" there. I can't believe how badly our "overlords" have mis-served us. As far as I'm concerned, they have forfeited their right to our obedience. The heads of corporations should fear us, not the other way around.

I'm ready to pitch in and buy John Galt a one-way ticket, because he's a big selfish fuck-up.

Globalization

[mwfischer]

Muslim... water
Buddhist... water
Hindu... water
Seventh Day.... water
Mormon... actually lost, needs directions

What do I win?

The Last Starfigher

[severett]

In other words someone watched The Last Starfighter. Not exactly a new concept.

What about learning?

[utkonos]

Do you look at how the candidate plays the game after three or four times? Or perhaps you let the candidate play the game for a day, then look at their performance the next day. Are they still not very good at the game, or have they mastered the game?

I would be much more interested in hiring someone who can master the game in a short period of time than someone who passes some lower standard instantly, but stays at that level.

Re:Principle

[TaoPhoenix]

"The Perter Principal Lives!"
You have risen to your level of spelling incompetence.