The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

–Steve Jobs

There was a lot of talk about the infamous Google brainteaser and other tricky challenges that Google and some other tech companies are slowly discovering doesn’t help their recruiting in any way. Because we went through the same mistake, we decided to share a bit more about what we know works, what we know doesn’t and what we are not yet sure about. Of course, it is very contextual and, depending on your company culture, it may or may not be applicable. But at least, we share.

This post is the second in our serie about recruiting technics at Seedbox.
Look at our overall practices and their reason-to-be in our first article here

Seriously ? Lego during interviews ???

A few weeks ago, one of our Amazing ScrumMaster (we only recruit them amazing), came with the idea that we could add an opportunity to create a game-oriented, symbolically abstracted conversation with soon-to-be-recruited candidates.

The basic principle was to create an unfamiliar exercise with familiar tools to engage the candidate in a improvised, honest self-discovery exercise through the medium of Legos.

As we love to experiment at Seedbox, we were eager for Omar to come with an exercise that would trigger that conversation.

Though, one of the big risk we were very sensitive about, was scaring the candidate and being seen as ‘not serious’. The way we decided to take care of that risk was to stage this exercise at the 2d (and last) interview with the candidate, just before the candidate meet with the team.

Why did we think it would be an efficient mitigation ?

As we already had a ‘serious’ (but cordial) classical interview with him already, we made sure to demonstrate our professionalism deeply tainted with creativity

As we knew that the candidate was indeed interested to work with us, we knew that we already had started to build trust with him, then we had to just explain correctly what was the aim of the exercise, which would, as a side effect, even strengthen this mutual trust

Also, we made sure, during the 1st interview, to warn that a different, yet interesting Lego exercise would come if the candidate was selected for the 2d interview

So, here is a short 5 min extract of our first 30+ minutes Lego-enhanced conversation :

Doing it proper

The interview is split in 3 parts :

in the first 5 minutes, the candidate just freely create a shape from a given set of Legos, he then proceed to answer some question ALWAYS RELATED to the shape to ease out and distance himself from being the subject of the interview

in the next 10 minutes, the candidate is given a choice between 4 different shapes and is given a closed timeframe to realize it, he has then to answer a set of question both related to the shape, and the different choices he made while making it

in the last 15 minutes, the candidate is given free reign to make a shape but to answer a specific question about himself, he then proceed to explain how this shape answer the question, and why did he choose to make it that way.

What’s in it for…?

As you can see, we very much liked the result.

At the end of this part of the interview, the candidate :

had talked honestly about himself, his experience and challenges, sometime without even consciously doing it

was relaxed and enjoyed the playfulness of our group of interviewers

had demonstrated multiple collaborative qualities (ability to expose his need for more explanation, ability to explain in simple terms complex situation and experiences, ability to share his opinions by use of argumentation, etc…)

was eager to know more about his team and what the position entitled

And for us, the interviewers, we :

learned much more about the candidate

saw the candidate trying to understand a different process and adapt to it

saw how much easy communication with the candidate was, especially when the requirement where complex / not clear

learned what was important to the candidate

So, as of right now, be prepared, if you are selected as a candidate at Seedbox, you may have to seriously play Lego !