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Playing Games To Get Hired ....

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9 comments, last by DanglinBob 9 years, 1 month ago

Seriously, WTH is wrong with corporate America now-a-days ...

If I am bad at playing video games, some companies won't bother hiring me now ! [ LINK ]

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Your statement has nothing to do with the contents of your link.

Your statement has nothing to do with the contents of your link.

The link leads to an article about companies using how someone plays retro games as a method to "weed out" bad candidates.

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applicant screening system is Pymetrics, which subjects job seekers to a series of one- to three-minute games meant to match them up with positions

Pymetrics uses existing games that are about 10 to 20 years old.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

And (maybe I missed it) the article mentioned nothing about skill at games. It seemed to discuss how you play the game.

but there's no way to like 'game' the game

There are ALWAYS ways to 'game' the game.

The article is clearly a reporter's awful rewrite of a marketer's interpretation of a product developed by people who actually understand the data.

I notice the quote in the article about "no way to game the game" didn't come from anyone inside the company, but came from a college student who found a job using their tool. That's a rather stupid way to get a quote about how the innards work. While you might ask a PowerPoint user about what the user experience was like, it makes much less sense to ask the same user about the nuance of how PowerPoint works internally. Similarly, the reporter talking to a past customer could ask what their experience was like, but questioning them on the data science behind the tool is bad reporting.

Looking over their team information they've got some people with names. No idea who they are but the names and details say Ms Yoo (PhD, numeric analysis of brain functions), Mr Cohen (PhD, computational analysis of emotional regulation in humans and animals), Mr Salvatore (MS, MIT, cognitive science), and a few more. So while the marketers may not know anything about statistics and data analysis, the geeks behind it probably have some idea what they are doing.

The theory behind seems fairly reasonable:

Study how lots of people play games involving logic reasoning, spatial reasoning, social reasoning. Use those results of known people in known jobs to find where a new user fits, and recommend jobs that are similar to those they match. Someone who suck as logic problems but excels in social reasoning may have lots of matches with people in marketing or sales. Someone who excels at logic problems but sucks at social skills may be recommended toward technical jobs.

As far as data goes, that seems fair enough. If they are careful about building "games" that actually equate to those areas of reasoning (which is hard to do but possible for low-exposure to the tasks), then they have enough data points to see how lots of people who succeed in lots of fields score (which takes a lot of data), then they could certainly spend a few minutes to find out where an individual's score tends to cluster, and returning the career types of others who clustered in that area and succeeded in their careers.

Your statement has nothing to do with the contents of your link.

The link leads to an article about companies using how someone plays retro games as a method to "weed out" bad candidates.
Sounds like an alternative aptitude / personality test.
Nowhere does it say that they recommend against hiring people who are bad at those games...
The main point, or points, about playing games to get hired:

1. Being a player demonstrates passion for the product you are hired to create.
2. What games someone plays, and how he or she plays them, is indicative of character - and game hirers want to know that you'll fit in with the culture among the existing staff.
3. A common job interview question is, "what's your favorite game, and what do you like so much about that game?"

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

I actually think this could be a valid way to weed out good and bad candidates depending on the job they were recruiting for.

It sure beats the hell out of a startup I worked at a few years ago which used a candidates Klout Score https://klout.com/home to judge weather or not people were good candidates for programming and design roles.

I think this is an ok idea paired with sensationalist writing. Klout though... Oh man, that sounds horrifying/very easy to manipulate.

Also as someone with no social media profiles (Facebook/G+/Twitter/0 google results/instagram/linkein/whateverelseyoudamnkidsusethesedays), I wonder what my score would be. Would I be 0% trustworthy?

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