There’s been an ongoing debate about the best way to recruit new employees. Some say it’s all about well designed hiring procedures – from initial screening to shortlisting to detailed and multiple job interviews. Some claim it’s all about enthusiasm and the right personality match.

Still others prefer to actually employ candidates and ask them to work on a real-life project for a spell. What are the pros and cons of such an approach?

Check out: Projects Are the New Job Interviews

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Glossary

• too clever by half – too confident of your own intelligence in a way that annoys other people
• bespoke – made to order
• interrogatory – questioning
• iron-clad – impossible to contradict, weaken, or change
• iterate – the repetition of a process or utterance
• sleazy – sordid, corrupt, or immoral
• nascent – just coming into existence and beginning to display signs of future potential

Think about it

Are the sentences below true or false?

• Knowledge working hiring is particularly prone to adapting project based model of hiring.
• Prospective candidates may be asked to prepare an online training session for their potential employer.
• Well-designed recruitment procedures have proved invaluable for most organizations
• Companies that venture into “applijects” offer decent money to the candidates as they’re being recruited.
• Talented people like to put their skills to practical use rather than do their best to verbally present these skills to an interviewer.

Practice makes perfect

 In the sentences below replace the phrases in bold with the expressions from the original text.

• World-class talent will engage in tailor-made real-world projects testing their abilities to deliver real value by themselves and with others.
• Yes, sometimes these sessions effectively pit two or three candidates against each other.
• More importantly, everyone in the enterprise now understands that people only get hired if and only if they deliver something more than a decent track record and social graph.
• In my opinion, this approach is an order of magnitude more ethical than the “free” and unpaid internship infrastructure [. . .]

Fill in the blank spaces with the missing words. You can only put one word in each blank space.

Call them “projeclications” or “applijects.” World-class talent will engage ______ bespoke real-world projects testing their abilities to deliver real value ______ their own and with others. Forget the “What’s Your Greatest Weakness?” interrogatory genre; the real question will be how well candidates can rise ______ the “appliject” challenge and help redesign a social media campaign, document ______ tricky bit of software, edit a Keynote presentation, produce a webinar or peer review a CAD layout ______ a contract Chinese manufacturer.

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