Recruitment through gameplay

Recruitment through interviews is antiquated and boring and frankly yields subjective results… What if there’s a better way?

Had an interesting idea some time back but finally had a chance to give it some serious thought. This was a month or two ago while playing Overcooked at a friend’s house (and no they are not sponsoring this post in anyway… it’s just an awesome game). Observing the game play as an outsider and actually being a player made me realize it’s an amazing tool to assess team dynamics and how well groups of people actually work together (or don’t work together).

The proposal

What if hiring was done through game play like a game such as overcooked (or now overcooked 2).

Quick idea of what overcooked is like. Each character is controlled by a real life person and most of the time it’s just hectic

It makes a lot of sense:

• It’s fun
• It’s simple
• All players have a common objective
• It weeds out overly aggressive behaviors
• Introverts are competing on a more even playing field
• Leaders tend to emerge through a democratic process

So how to make it work:

1. Randomly pair people into teams of 4
2. Observe their behavior during game play
3. Observe who are the nominees for leaders
4. Observe the performance before and after
5. After one round, have a leaderboard to show the scores
6. Allow the teams to force rank their fellow team mates
7. At the same time see if they have team mates they wish to eliminate (this removes bad behavior such as selfishness or over aggression)
8. Randomly assign the teams again and repeat from step 1 for two more cycles (anything over 3 rounds gets a tad tedious and tiring)

So what happens next?

To spice things up, confederates (existing team members) can be inserted in as candidates to allow them to get a feel of whether they want to work with the candidates and if they can see them as potential team mates.

The other issue is that Overcooked has a limitation of a maximum of 4 players. Sometimes it is good to look at groups at a bigger level. As a next step it would be good to allow the final 8 candidates to compete with each other on Mario Kart in the battle mode.

This gives an even better picture on how individuals work together (or not) from the game play. Preferred candidates would be the ones that reach out to other candidates to formulate a plan and work together as this is a free for all hunger games style game play.

I’m curious to find out if anyone has tried this before in terms of recruitment and if the results have been good. Or if anyone is interested to experiment, I would definitely love to be a part of the spectators that help to document behavior during the recruitment process 😃