Is there a way to be both professional and light-hearted when it comes to your employee interview process? A piece from the Tennessean recently looked at the practices of a company called Technology Advice, where the interview process starts with standard questioning and ends with a ping-pong tournament.
As the source notes, there seems to be more to this than simple recreation. According to the company's data strategy director, Andrew Belcher, the observations made of the candidate during ping-pong prove useful in assessing a candidate's possible performance later on.
"Over time, you may be assigned things you weren't originally assigned to do and you have your hectic deadlines and things like that," Belcher said. "We are trying to see if there is any correlation to how people adjust. Are they able to pick up and adapt?"
In this light, the table tennis seems less like playtime and more like a test to bring out aspects of a possible employee that might not show up on paper. While extrapolating game behavior to more general personality traits can be risky, it does seem to have some relevance to elements of business that even major companies find valuable.
Take Google's hiring policy, as elucidated by Laszlo Bock in a recent New York Times interview, where, along with slamming the traditional values of academic grades, he outlined Google's five "hiring attributes,"including things like learning ability and humility, which might very well play a role in the rec room.
Regardless of whether or not your company is interested in games or other non-traditional interview elements, it can turn to an executive recruiter to assess what an individual might really bring to the table.
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