Arguably, I was hired along those lines, along with everyone else who gets a job in BigLaw out of law school. Sure, I went through an interview process, but basically I got hired because I had really good grades–the interview was primarily to make sure I wasn’t an ax murderer.
There is an old anecdote told about a telegraph operator who responded to an employment ad. When he got to the telegraph station, there were a lot of applicants, all talking together and wondering when the interviews would begin while the a telegraph could be heard in the next room. Rather than waiting in line, the operator walked over to the next room and got the job. The code emanating from the next room had given instructions that anyone listening to the code should come in for an interview.
(I heard this story told about some famous person, (Thomas Edison?), but I have no idea whether the event ever happened.)
I work for a software/hardware company and our hiring process is almost entirely skills-based. Education/experience might help you get noticed by our recruiting department, but if you can get past that part (either through luck, or by knowing somebody, or whatever) and then do well on the formal interview (which consists of several rounds of almost entirely skill-based questions, you’ll get the job.
Caveat one: experience helps in that it gives us another avenue for skills evaluation. If you say you’ve worked on XYZ project and then demonstrate in-person that you’ve retained those skills, then it impresses us. If you retained nothing, or it looks like you were only tangentially involved but listed the project to pad out your resume, then you earn big fat minus points. Otherwise, it’s somewhat neutral and we’ll ask you other questions. In other words, experience may make it easier in that we can ask questions more directed toward your skill set, but if you can answer any questions equally well then it doesn’t matter.
Caveat two: if you have enough behavioral problems that we can’t easily evaulate your skills, then we have a problem. If you seize up in an interview and can’t answer anything, there’s not much we can do, even if you’d be fine in the actual job.
My first job was data entry. I had no qualifications other than doing well on a test. There wasn’t even really an interview.
In other words, your memory works just like everyone else.
In Germany, stenographers who are able to write shorthand fast enough to capture spoken language are almost impossible to find (for decades now, actually). The official requirement to be a stenographer in one of the German parliaments (which is a well-paid position in the civil service) is to have a university degree.
Since there are hardly any qualified applicants (you usually have to learn shorthand early in life and practise a lot to become proficient), they are willing to waive that requirement in a heartbeat and hire people with no college education at all – provided they are exceptionally good stenographers.
Yeah. The expectation with those questions is that you already have a number of stories worked out that will fit. That stuff is BS really, they’re really just testing to see how prepared you are for the interview. Obviously that is an indication that you are keen but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be any good at the job.
The Chinese imperial civil service exams are another example; if you knew enough about classic poetry, Confucian texts, etc., you could get a job as an administrator.
Way back when I was in Army Basic Training and I was voluntold to go take a test. Like all Army soldiers I had already locked in to my job but that training was in the future. So some of us were sent to a classroom for the morning. I didn’t mind because it was inside and warm. What was I thinking when I decided to go to Basic in February? I mean Kentucky is kinda in the south, how cold could it be?
Anyway… I suppose they were short on a couple of Military Intelligence fields. I was given the DLAB, the language apptitude test and another test that I can’t remember the name of. It was basically listening to a bunch of beeps and being able to tell the patterns. After they scored the test they told me I passed the DLAB but not with a high enough score to be picked for language training. I totally aced the other test. I was offered an oppurtunity to change my MOS and become a Signal Interceptor which included many months of training and a very large (for that time anyway) bonus. I turned it down. When the job was explained to me it seemed like I would probably go crazy listening to beeps for months at a time.
My only cite is the memory of a Reader’s Digest anecdote some 40 years ago, but if I remember correctly a park ranger reported that he got a position because he was the only person who showed up at the application site, which was an isolated, snow-bound cabin atop a mountain.
There aren’t going to be any where the test is the only thing that matters - after all, you don’t want to hire the best X in the world if he doesn’t show up for work or if she got fired for stealing from her last employer. There are probably plenty where the test is the most important factor after you meet minimum standards in some other areas. For example both “entry level” civil service jobs I had (they weren’t really entry level, just entry level for that particular field) required a bachelor’s degree and one required three years of experience. But once you met that minimum, having a master’s degree or ten years of experience didn’t matter. You wouldn’t even want to hire the last starfighter based on only his skills- you’d want to at least make sure he wasn’t sympathetic toward the enemy.
Anecdotes notwithstanding, “interviews” for jobs in telegraphy did normally consist of simply sitting the applicant down at a key and seeing if he could keep up. As a result, good telegraphers would often move around an lot, confident that they would be able to get a good job anywhere.
My dad has told me things were like this with computers when he got out of college in the 60s. He got a job by writing a simple program at an interview.
“Damn it Michael Bay, those aren’t ideas…those are special effects!”
“I don’t understand the difference.”
I don’t think that’s what the OP meant. Going through the proper education and getting good marks is the standard way of getting a job.
The “Last Starfighter” method would be like…I don’t know…if your college debate team was secretly a test by Latham & Watkins to pick new 1st year associates.
I suspect that in the IT world there are a lot more examples of independent programmers getting hired by startups or larger firms based solely on some awesome app they created.
But really, from a business standpoint, you don’t want to have your entire business dependent on the extraordinary abilities of a couple of “aces”.
So then maybe you aren’t a good fit for those sort of positions? The system works. Someone who has been in a position where they repeatedly demonstrated leadership and who understand what leadership means should be able to answer the question very easily.
The problem IMHO is that very few companies have objective methodologies for conducting interviews. I’ve interviewed candidates from a number of different companies. Sometimes HR gives me a bunch of behavioral questions to ask or a list of desirable traits to score (leadership, communications, handshakeitute). Not once have I ever been given any information as to what a “correct” answer should look like.
Usually what it just comes down to is just whether we like them or not.
Yes, this is what I was talking about. I’m including examples where the candidate knows that they are taking an employment test, but I’m very interested in “secret” evaluations like the Last Starfighter. Did Google ever extend an offer of employment just for solving one of their puzzles, without having the candidate go through a second, more regular round that involved evaluation of academic degrees, work history, etc.? Has a police department ever staged a mock crime scene to entice passersby to attempt to intervene, and then gathered the “concerned and brave citizen responders” and offered to make them all cops, possibly contingent on not being a three time convicted sex offender just released on parole last Tuesday but not contingent on having X degree, at least Y years of experience, or impressing a hiring manager in a traditional interview with their 1337 in73rv13w1ng 5k11lz?
Specifically as to the OP, a long time ago I was told that the Israel Defense Force had people loiter (?!–probably, if done at all, pre-screen in HS) at places where kids would play flying arcade electronic games–this dates when I heard it–to check for preternatural coordination, for candidates for the Air Force.
Up thread this type of thing was referred to as an urban myth.
“Handshakitude.” Great word. Thanks.
I was hired to do freelance proofreading on the basis of a test. They sent a document to all the applicants to see if they could find the errors. Evidently, I did the best job of it.
It wasn’t the entire reason – they interviewed me, and probably would have said “no” if the didn’t like the interview – but it allowed them to screen out those who would do poorly. If you got everything right, I don’t think they would have cared about your background.
In the romantic age (say ~300+ years ago), presumably more mathematicians obtained a patron or a royal or university seat by solving problem, publishing a paper/book than by any other means (other than recommendation). (They commonly obtained fame purely by publishing a result). I’m thinking of one of the Bernoulli’s, Gauss and so on. I suspect that disbelief in Christianity, or a public aversion to royalty probably would have disqualified them from their posts.
In more recent age, Srinivasa Ramunjam famously obtained an invite to England and a place at Cambridge on the basis of a letter that he wrote with some of his results.
This seems like OP’s strictures ?
Hmmm… Isn’t this the basis of American Idol and similar shows? Combine ability test and market appeal research while selling commercial time at a premium.
No wonder Cowell is rich.