The Gamification of Hiring

First time accepted submitter funge writes "The Economist has an article on Work and play: The gamification of hiring about a start-up that lets you play games to show off your talents to prospective employers. From the article: 'The rules of Happy Hour are deceptively simple. You are a bartender. Your challenge is to tell what sort of drink each of a swelling mob of customers wants by the expressions on their faces. Then you must make and serve each drink and wash each used glass, all within a short period of time. Play this video game well and you might win a tantalizing prize: a job in the real world.'"

What about learning?

[utkonos]

Do you look at how the candidate plays the game after three or four times? Or perhaps you let the candidate play the game for a day, then look at their performance the next day. Are they still not very good at the game, or have they mastered the game?

I would be much more interested in hiring someone who can master the game in a short period of time than someone who passes some lower standard instantly, but stays at that level.

Re:Dance, monkey, dance!

[pitchpipe]

Seriously, WTF is wrong with employers these days??

It's corporatocracy at its finest. With fewer and fewer jobs, and more and more wealth being concentrated in the hands of the few, it is not surprising to see our corporate masters starting to act like the feudal lords of old. We are there for their entertainment.

Because corporations are gathering power over our lives that used to belong only to the government, we need a bill of rights that covers interactions between corporations and individuals, their 'corporations are citizens too' bullshit notwithstanding.

I, for one, do not welcome our corporate overlords.

Re:Dance, monkey, dance!

[PopeRatzo]

If it's any comfort to you, it usually ends with the elimination of some heads. It just takes time.

I know, but that's some cold comfort.

For me, I don't really care. My working life, my accumulating life is over. I've gotten to a point, by long design, where these things don't affect me so directly any more.

But I've got a kid, a daughter, who's just getting started in life. It burns me up that the world she's getting ready to take on is so hostile to the traditional values of love, family, integrity, fairness.

Because to the people in charge, "family values" means making sure that two gay guys can't get the same rights as my wife and me, but to me, "family values" means that a family can afford to send kids to school and get mom surgery if she needs it and maybe retire to a simple life of ease for a few years. "Family values" means that buying a home is more than the three-card monte game that the financial industry has made it. I was there the day my mom and dad burned their mortgage on a house my dad was able to buy after coming home from WWII. How many families ever get to a "mortgage burning" any more? How many people in their fifties or sixties ever see that kind of independence? And it's not by accident that the answer is "very few".

People want to talk about the "gamification" of the job market. How freaking insulting. Human beings take work seriously. The work they do is not just about bringing home a check. I don't care if you're a machinist like my dad or a garbage man or a computer programmer. Our elites have turned it all to shit, and now they want us to fix it all for them by working an extra five years of our lives and by sending our kids to trade school instead of university and by renting instead of buying.

I always go stop and stand around near my mom and dad's grave on memorial day. I look at the flag on my dad's headstone and the mention of "family and country" there. I can't believe how badly our "overlords" have mis-served us. As far as I'm concerned, they have forfeited their right to our obedience. The heads of corporations should fear us, not the other way around.

I'm ready to pitch in and buy John Galt a one-way ticket, because he's a big selfish fuck-up.

Re:Dance, monkey, dance!

[SuricouRaven]

When I was on the dole, the benefits money was conditional upon my showing constant effort to apply for work. Unfortunatly I don't drive, and so my working radius was limited. There just weren't that many jobs I was willing to accept within reach, so I ended up submitted a lot of 'pad the numbers' applications. Half-hearted standard cover letter, standard CV, off they go. Because I didn't care if I didn't get that job, I was holding out for something better.

I got the something better, eventually. It still sucks, but it sucks less than a hour-long commute on the train to man helpdesk would.

Another factor was that the employment advisor kept asking me to apply for jobs I was completly unqualified for, on the grounds that one computer job is much like the other. I had a diploma in networking and a very good knowledge of hardware - and, to the layperson, that makes me perfectly qualified for a position as a web designer or programmer in languages completly unfamiliar to me. So it is quite possible that some of those sloppy resumes are by people who don't actually want the job at all, but need to apply in order to put on a show.