Will your next job interview be a video game?

Will your next job interview be a video game?

Videogames are becoming a more popular feature of job interviews. Could they start to replace the face-to-face job interview — and should they?

Companies like Google once became famous for their now shelved interview brainteasters, ranging from figuring out how many piano tuners were in the world to the (oddly threatening) question of what someone shrunk to the size of a nickel should do to escape from a blender.

Videogames may be the next trend in the hiring process, with companies like Shell and Xerox already experimenting with adding them into their hiring process. Catherine Rampell in theNew York Times magazine looks at some of the perks, and some of the perils, of the process:

The very act of quantifying certain characteristics may also give a false sense of precision that leads to overweighting the things quantified. "You are what you measure," warned Dan Ariely, an economist at Duke. Ariely thinks the hiring process should become more data-driven, but acknowledges that applying sabermetrics, or the sort of empiricism that helped turn Billy Beane's Oakland A's into a winner, to the recruiting process can still create distortions. Online dating sites, for instance, often overemphasize measurable and sortable attributes (like height and income) at the expense of other ineffable ones that might be more useful or relevant. "If I want to hire people for my basketball team, it's easy to tell who's seven feet tall and who can shoot the ball really well," explained Alvin Roth, a Stanford economist who shared a Nobel Prize for his work on market design and recently joined Knack's board. "The hard thing is figuring out when they're on the court, how will the rest of the team do?"

Have you ever had a job interview with a videogame? Do you think videogames will replace, augment, or fade away from the job interview? And would you want to interview via videogame? Tell us in the comments now.

Image: włodi.