Gaming To Replace the Job Interview
Wired’s Ben Paynter thinks gaming could provide hiring managers the information they need to select job candidates. Color me skeptical. There are certainly skills that could be identified that way (I believe there are MBA factories that accept any candidate who can win a game of monopoly, but perhaps I digress). If you’re looking for someone who is logical, analytical, capable of managing several tasks at once and synthesizing input from many sources, it’s not hard to imagine designing a game to challenge and score these areas. But what about the soft skills? Can you really design a game that could evaluate someone’s ability to form productive alliances, persuade, collaborate, lead? The strategic thinking required for a game is of a very different order than that required to manage a business.
And remember: “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice, there is”*. Ultimately games are just another test, which suffer from the same problem as all tests: there’s a difference between test-taking and real life. Who we are in the exam hall isn’t the person we are in the street, or office. There are many differences of contextual information, environmental cues, and social dynamics. How a problem is posed in a game is very different from how you will encounter it in a conference room. I can see games being used to screen a pool of candidates, but I’ll be surprised if anyone is hired primarily on the basis of a game score any time soon.
* This is a quote, but Google was unable to help me attribute it with certainty.
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