Steve Jobs had a 'beer test' he would use for interviewing people at Apple
Steve Jobs, the late CEO and founder of tech giant Apple, was believed to conduct a 'beer test' which helped him decide which prospective employees were worth hiring.
Typically, job interviews are pretty formal processes which involve a stern interviewer and a nervous interviewee.
However, Jobs apparently scrapped this more traditional idea with his own inventive way of finding new staff. Which, if you ask us, is great as we can only imagine how daunting it would be to go through the application process for such a major company.
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According to as.com, the tech legend, known for inventing the phone that plenty of us have in our back pockets, wanted to 'break' away from the typical interviewing process that involved candidates turning up to be quizzed on a list of answers they'd memorized in a script-like manner.
For this very reason, Jobs dropped all formalities and kept it pretty casual.
Instead of considering if he ‘would have a beer with this person’ or if he’d talked to them ‘in a relaxed way while taking a walk’, he did just that.
Jobs would reportedly take his potential employees for a walk and for a quick drink in order to decide whether or not to hire them. This removed the formality from the situation, causing candidates to relax and give more honest answers and ask questions they might not ask in a stuffy meeting room.
Jobs would reportedly ask them questions such as 'when was the last time you accomplished something?' or a simple 'what did you do last summer?'
These casual questions were almost like something an old friend would ask, consequently causing the pair to become acquainted much quicker.
He didn’t exactly look for any right or wrong answers but instead aimed to get to know the candidate better.
Let's be honest, a colleague who knows everything about their job is great, but if they're a nightmare to work alongside its probably not worth having them on board.
Jobs’ unique interviewing process was to find the very best of the best, the ‘A-Players’ as he'd call them.
He previously explained: “I found that when you get enough A-players together, when you go through the incredible job of finding these A-players, they really like working with each other.
“Because they’ve never had the chance to do it before.”