Scott Gray's Weblog » initiative http://rsgray.com Thoughts from the Nintendo Generation Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:00:49 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Tool for finding Employees with Initiative http://rsgray.com/original/tool-for-finding-employees-with-initiative/ http://rsgray.com/original/tool-for-finding-employees-with-initiative/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:49:24 +0000 scott http://rsgray.com/?p=70 A few days ago a friend and I were lamenting some of our coworkers over the years who have just completely lacked initiative. We started thinking about different ways in an interview process you could figure out whether a potential employee possessed some level of initiative. It took us a while, but I finally hit on it.  Bring the interviewee into a room. The only things in the room are a bean bag chair, a television, an original Nintendo, Kid Icarus inserted, and the manual for the game.

Ask the interviewee to play for a few minutes and then leave the room.  Proceed to your hidden cameras and watch what they do.  Now, any old school gamer out there, will know that you NEVER look at the manual. The original nintendo controller only had a direction pad, select, start, A, and B.  If the interviewee, immediately reaches for the manual don’t look to them for initiative in the future. If on the other hand, they grab that remote and proceed to systematically figure out for themselves what each button does, all the while a big grin on their faces? Yeah, those guys you can trust to not be afraid to hit a few buttons and see what happens and then use that knowledge to beat the game.  They might break your internally built software a time or two, but they’ll only help make those systems better in the future.

Why a beanbag chair? Because I’m a little sadistic and would get a kick out of seeing people in suits trying to look all dignified while sitting in a bean bag chair ;-)

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