If you thought asking our 7 Tough Brainteasers to Assess an Interviewee’s Critical Thinking abilities was strange, you haven’t seen anything yet!
Let’s face it, the recruitment process isn’t always fun.
From ‘no-shows’ to joke applications, it can take time to find true talent.
However, some businesses around the world have made some weird and wonderful adjustments to their recruitment methods.
Here are four of the top "weird and wonderful" ways to assess candidates.
Hosting wine and cheese parties
At Creative Niche, candidates have to go through two rounds of interviews. If they successfully pass these stages, they are then invited to a wine and cheese party with the current employees.
In other words, it’s kind of like a speed dating session! While current employees don’t have to attend, many do, as they are eager to see who their potential new colleagues are.
After the process, the group all gives a person a thumbs up or down. Unless it’s unanimous, the candidate won’t be offered the job – talk about a tall order!
While it might seem a bit cutthroat, the strategy has boosted Creative Niche’s staff retention rate to 90%.
The idea was created after the company hired some bad cultural hires. By adding in a third crucial stage into the interview process, it enabled the company to slow down and take stock.
Getting current employees involved not only makes them feel more valued, but it improves productivity within the business too.
Plus, who can argue with free cheese and wine?
Ditch CVs
This odd technique was implemented by the tech firm, Detroit Labs. Instead of getting candidates to send in their CVs, they ask them to fill out a Getting to Know You (GTKY) document.
The form includes a variety of questions ranging from hobbies to skill-based ones.
They are even asked to list the titles of some book on their bookshelf or on their Kindle, their favourite bloggers and the last new skill they learned.
The answers to the GTKY document are then distributed to the current employees who are encouraged to share their opinions.
The co-founder of Detroit Labs, Nathan Hughes, says: “The GTKY is designed to replace the filler we often see in resumes with the kind of information we really want to use to determine if a candidate should come in for an in-person interview”.
“We hope they tell us if the candidate has the aptitude for the job, the motivation to succeed in our environment, and the willingness to put in the effort and energy during this early stage to tell us their story and get us interested.”
One of the highlight questions on the form is: “Fill in a question you really wanted me to ask, that question you most want to answer.”
The unimaginative candidates will write something like: “Why should our company hire you?” And reply with “Because I’m the best.”
Ideally, this question is about testing a candidate’s eagerness to think innovatively and present it in a witty way.
Conduct an interview via text message
Nope, this isn’t a drill!
Tech company Canvas has decided to jump on the popularity of SMS as a communications channel and conduct text-based interviews during the early stages of the process.
It’s designed to save the time of both recruiters and candidates by weeding out the ones who aren’t appropriate for the role.
The assessment method is also a sneaky way of testing how good a candidate’s spelling and grammar is as well!
Invite a candidate to spend a day in the role
The final example in our list of weird ways to assess a candidate is taken from Market Recruitment.
From a candidate point of view, accepting a job without actually working a day in it is like buying a new expensive from an unknown dealer. You need to test drive it first!
Do they get on with the rest of your team? Are they as good as they say they are? So many questions can be answered by implementing this unusual, but effective assessment method.
The director of Market Recruitment, Matt Dodgson, says: “This [the mini-workday] usually entails being given a project that can be accomplished within four hours (the candidate is given some prep materials beforehand), and then lunch with the team afterwards”.
“We then conduct an in-depth interview with the candidate the next week to evaluate their performance and ask focused follow-up questions.”
“We’ve found that this puts candidates on the hot seat, but it gives us and clients better insight as to how the candidate would fit within the position and the team.”
Final thoughts
So, there you go!
While these methods of assessing candidates might appear unconventional and damn right wacky, they certainly make the whole recruitment process a little more exciting.
If you want to jazz things up, try one of these and monitor the results.
If there’s an improvement in the candidate feedback scores or you generate a higher influx of applications, perhaps, these might be worth adopting on a full-time basis.
Good luck!
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