Hire Power: The odd tactics firm are using to find staff

Imagine for a second that you've applied for a senior (very well-paying) role at a big tech company.

On paper, you’re a perfect fit. You fly through the application process and come away from the interview confident you’ve impressed everyone on the panel.

But then you get word that you’ve missed out on the job - but not because there was a flaw in what you said to the executives at the company. It was because a driver – who doesn’t even work for the company in question - didn’t like your vibe.

That might seem strange - and even unfair. But it’s an experience that at least some wannabe Duolingo workers will have faced recently.

In an interview for The Burnouts podcast last month, its CEO Luis Von Ahn spoke about the time that they’d spent around a year looking for a new chief financial officer. Having found what they thought to be the right candidate – one who was good on paper and impressive to the interview panel – they rejected them after being told they were rude to the taxi driver.

And he knew that because, he revealed, one way the language learning platform weeded out job candidates was to pay taxi drivers to find out how a candidate behaved on their way to an interview.

Duolingo’s reckoning being that, if they’re the type of person to be rude to a driver, they’re probably going to be rude to their colleagues - and especially those that work below them.

The practice does immediately raise lots of questions.

How consistent are they in using feedback from taxi drivers? What happens if a candidate makes their own way to an interview? How much work is done to make sure the taxi driver is being fair – and not just giving someone a bad report because they didn’t tip enough (or because they clashed with some bias the driver already had)?

The revelation has also raised questions about the ethics of the interview process – and whether it is fair to 'test’ a candidate without their explicit knowledge.

Although that ‘everything is a test’ mentality does appear to have become quite popular in some companies in recent years.

Always On

JP Morgan’s big boss Jamie Dimon has previously claimed he’s more interested in how people treat their teller staff and security guards than what’s on their CV. What he’s looking for, he says, is ‘street smarts’. However it’s not clear if he’s actively built feedback from ground-level staff into his company’s interview and hiring process.

Others have taken a far more direct approach to testing a candidate’s mettle.

Erika Nardini – who at the time was CEO of popular sports media outfit Barstool Sports - told the New York Times she liked to test candidates’ commitment to the job by texting candidates on the weekend and timing how long it took them to respond.

What she was looking for was a quick response – even during a person’s supposed downtime (apparently a response within three hours was acceptable to her.)

Meanwhile tech executive Trent Innes told podcast The Ventures that he uses what he called the coffee cup test.

For this, he brings a candidate to the kitchen to grab a coffee before the formal, sit-down interview begins. He then watches to see what they do with the cup after the interview has taken place.

If they look to bring it back to the kitchen and give it a rinse, that’s a good sign. If they leave it on the table – for someone else to deal with – that’s a sign they’ve got the wrong attitude for the job.

(Another, similar technique is the ‘salt and pepper test’ – where a candidate is brought to lunch and monitored to see how they season their food. Tasting your food before adding salt and pepper was a good sign – but seasoning first suggested you were impatient and prone to making assumptions.)

Of course there are far less complicated ways that candidates can expect to be getting tested outside of the formal interview process. Most job applicants should probably assume that their social media history will be delved into – even for lower-level roles – and many are likely to have taken evasive action to ensure that doesn’t scupper their chances.

Outside the box-ticking

But some companies are getting very out-there, even with their formal interview process.

For example the Wall Street Journal reported that some job candidates have being asked to workout with hiring managers – rather than have a regular sit-down interview.

That immediately raises any number of questions – and potential equality legislation violations.

Meanwhile Google has, for a long time, been king of the strange interview process.

Back in 2004 it put up a billboard which just had ‘{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}’, followed by ‘.com’.

The actual web address was the answer to that equation – with ‘.com’ added to the end. The idea being that a person had to be smart enough to solve the equation to even have the right to apply for the job.

But it’s not just the application process. Google was also legendary for asking really strange questions that were allegedly designed to try to test people’s problem solving and critical thinking skills.

Candidates might be asked to estimate how many golf balls would fit in a school bus, how many times a day to clock hands overlap, or else work out how many piano tuners are there in the world

In other cases, candidates were told to image they’d been shrunk to the size of a paperclip and put in a blender – which was going to be turned on in ten seconds. They’d then have to explain what they’d do to escape.

It should be said, though, Google have stopped using these kinds of questions. It turns out that they didn’t actually help them to find the best candidates for their jobs.

Other companies, meanwhile, have gone to the other extreme in their questions – being totally up-front about what they’re going to ask.

Levelling the playing field

British retailer John Lewis has led the way in publishing its interview questions – an approach many companies are now starting to take.

John Lewis says it’s doing so to give everyone a fair shot. Because not everyone will have the same training or experience when it comes to traditional interviews, not everyone will have the same opportunity to prepare, and some people simply struggle in that artificial environment of an interview.

So, they say, by telling everyone what they’re going to be asked, they feel they’ll actually get a better idea of what kind of person the candidate is.

There is some obvious logic in that, too.

Often candidates are asked to give examples of how they used their initiative, resolved a conflict or solved a problem. When put on the spot, many may struggle to think of a good example – and so might fluff their way through their answer, or feel greater pressure to exaggerate and even lie.

But if they’re given a bit of time to think about the question, and get a good example straight in their head, that’s far more useful to the candidate and the company.

John Lewis also says it saves them time, because it gives people a better idea of the company and the role on offer. If they realise it’s not a fit before they even apply or sit down for an interview, then that’s good for everyone involved.

Time is money

Anything that simplifies and streamlines the interview process is sure to be welcomed by companies – and candidates.

Nowadays it is increasingly normal for a job application to involve five or more stages – which represents a significant time investment for candidates.

That’s not to mention the time they need to give over to prepping for interviews – getting to know the company, doing their research and preparations to try to ensure they have the right answers. Increasingly companies are asking candidates to prepare powerpoint presentations or essays to showcase their suitability to the job – creating an even greater time burden.

In the end that probably means a person having to take time off their current job to go through the application process for a new one – and if they’re applying for multiple different roles, that could quickly become a significant problem.

But of course all of this is a potential resource drain on companies too.

The bigger firm would have large teams of people dedicated to finding candidates for open roles – the logic being that you need to dedicate significant resources to ensure you have the right talent on-board.

But the more complicated and convoluted the process becomes, the bigger the team that manages hiring it needs to be. The trend of overly complicated job interviews also raises questions about how good these hiring teams are at what they do.

After all, if a firm can’t get the measure of a candidate after two or three stages of interviews is that a problem with the candidate, or with the company itself?

Though there is likely also a degree of performance in all of this.

By creating multiple hurdles, and obscure interview processes, these companies are vying to build a reputation that they only hire the smartest and most creative people in the workforce.

The likely truth is, though, that those that really are the best of the best are not the ones who have to jump through multiple hoops in order to land a better job.