Hotels.ng Goes In Search of Genius - Twice!
Social media is awesome! You know what else is awesome? Hotels.ng ON social media, if we do say so ourselves.
In April, Mark Essien began a social experiment/recruiting exercise that has formed the basis of several online conversations and inspired a number of blog posts.
On the 20th of April, Mark took to his Twitter and wrote:
"I was looking for someone who would excite me enough for the position I had in mind," Mark would say later on. "Since we already had a reasonable reach on Twitter, it figured that we would get the right fit for the position we wanted."
However, finding the right fit didn't come easily. That lone tweet sparked off a number of responses - both on the timeline and in Mark's email - and he had to sift through forty responses. Each candidate got a number of questions - each asked with no clear pattern and with no obvious answer sometimes. As the questions progressed, more and more candidates dropped out until there was only one left.
One of the questions Mark asked the candidates was: "In a series of question designed to quickly evaluate and eliminate candidates based on their response to free-form questions, what would be an ideal third question for those that have done well in the initial and second question, considering that difficulty of posed problem must be logarithmically harder than the prior questions?"
The answer given by the winning candidate was: "Considering that questions 1 and 2 which, being free-form, appealed to examiner’s interests/amusements (which the candidates, as established prior, managed to pass), an ideal third question to break a sweat should test the candidate’s ability to suggest a question that:
"I was looking for someone who would excite me enough for the position I had in mind," Mark would say later on. "Since we already had a reasonable reach on Twitter, it figured that we would get the right fit for the position we wanted."
However, finding the right fit didn't come easily. That lone tweet sparked off a number of responses - both on the timeline and in Mark's email - and he had to sift through forty responses. Each candidate got a number of questions - each asked with no clear pattern and with no obvious answer sometimes. As the questions progressed, more and more candidates dropped out until there was only one left.
One of the questions Mark asked the candidates was: "In a series of question designed to quickly evaluate and eliminate candidates based on their response to free-form questions, what would be an ideal third question for those that have done well in the initial and second question, considering that difficulty of posed problem must be logarithmically harder than the prior questions?"
The answer given by the winning candidate was: "Considering that questions 1 and 2 which, being free-form, appealed to examiner’s interests/amusements (which the candidates, as established prior, managed to pass), an ideal third question to break a sweat should test the candidate’s ability to suggest a question that:
- Suits the examiner’s interests/amusements. b. Poses a paradoxical loop for all concerned (effectively satisfying the need for ‘logarithmic difficulty.’)
