Recruitment with Manga & Wasabi, plus snoopy Knacks

Matching people with jobs can be simple, complicated, hilarious, frustrating, and more. The simplest method includes the most basic recruitment tool ever, which eventually results in being born into a job as a monarch or dictator, or both. Or into a bottomless trust fund. Since these are marginal cases, though on the rise, nobody in the HR/recruitment industry pays much attention to them.

The rest of us undergo formal recruitment. The more complex types of which include physical, mental, drug, and academic tests and interviews galore.

Did you know, for example, that the civil service tests in India are said to be the most demanding, toughest government exams on the planet - or come in as number 6 according to this web site?

India is also generally viewed as having one of the world's most inefficient and corrupt bureaucracies.

Which means, realistically, we could end any discussion of recruitment right here. Or point out that the same website says the Master Sommelier Diploma Exam is the toughest.

QED.

But we want to talk a little bit about the new world of big data used to match people and jobs. A very good introductory article on the subject is this 2013 piece in The Atlantic.
Don't worry about the fact that we will quote a two year old article on this paced paced topic.

There is some brand new information from 16 October 2015 at the end of the post!

The article has some examples of efforts to measure skills and abilities, including academic degrees and a variety of aptitude exams and psychological tests. The hot developments these days come under the labels workforce analytics and people analytics.

In a nutshell, they replace the patriarch captain of industry wandering the factory floor with a stopwatch and the psychologist's benign glance over the carefully arranged eye glasses with computer algorithms.

Some of the latter mine big data, while others make you play a game. It is mining of big data that made the blogster include "Manga" in the title. According to the Atlantic, a company that looks for coders found a clear correlation between being a good coder and visiting a certain Manga web site. They stress that this is just one small piece of data in their successful algorithm and that it may be transitional, i.e. change in the future.

It does illustrate one important - unmentioned - aspect: algorithms can be culture sensitive. Keep that in mind for later.

The games angle has been covered widely and been praised highly. The game Wasabi Waiter by Knack was recently mentioned by an up and coming education expert in Germany.

While high turnover, not very high skill jobs seem obvious targets, at least one test has been done with "innovators", a group much more highly respected for knowledge and skills.

The Atlantic quotes a change expert from oil giant Royal Dutch Shell on Wasabi as follows: Knack identified six broad factors as especially characteristic of those whose ideas would succeed at Shell: “mind wandering” (or the tendency to follow interesting, unexpected offshoots of the main task at hand, to see where they lead), social intelligence, “goal-orientation fluency,” implicit learning, task-switching ability, and conscientiousness. Haringa told me that this profile dovetails with his impression of a successful innovator. “You need to be disciplined,” he said, but “at all times you must have your mind open to see the other possibilities and opportunities.”

Knack's media page has all the Wasabi you can eat.

These articles discuss the known issues and fallacies of traditional hiring, such as the "what school again", "who's your daddy", "oh, that neighborhood", "we don't hire for looks, but your Playboy cover is needed as a data point for resume verification", and much more, and they explain how tools like Wasabi Waiter may bring greater equality for candidates who would fall through the cracks of the previous approaches. Which, in turn, may make traditionally privileged folks anxious about the future as cause general unease about the use of big data.

So, what's a blogster and potential future job seeker to do?

Check out the Knack web site. All the good statements, all the good employer logos, and two very discreet red buttons to get the Business App or the People App. Who can resist the optimistic We believe in your potential, and helping you reach it is our mission?

And here comes the brand new information from today!

Grab tablet.

Tap.

AppStore.

Fuck.

They want permission to snoop in my photos, they want my contacts.

Sorry, no dice, guys. Once I get a new tablet without any photos and an account with zero contacts, I'll see if I can game myself to some super knacks.

Remember the cultural aspect?

While the concepts mentioned by the Shell manager are certainly to a great extent cross cultural, the web site itself is not, and the one example from outside of the U.S. is the Philippines.
You may want to look at other cultures as well as a potential set of internal biases such as age related issues, despite the fact that you can find a substantial number of 40-ish gamers these days.