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 ?

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 :

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 :

And for us, the interviewers, we :

So, as of right now, be prepared, if you are selected as a candidate at Seedbox, you may have to seriously play Lego ! Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Don’t hesitate to share if you tried Lego Serious Play during recruiting, how did it go, and did you improve it to make it fit your needs !

Or check out our post about the whole recruiting process at Seedbox