MBA Recruitment: How Big Businesses Use Unconventional Recruiting Methods to Hire MBAs

Big businesses are using unconventional recruiting methods to attract the best people onto their payrolls. Their need has lead to some intriguing MBA recruiting methods and, on many occasions, to applause or to some severe head-scratching in the HR departments of the world. Ross Geraghty takes a look at such approaches and asks if they are valid methods or merely gimmicks.

There are some famous incidents of unconventional recruiting. According to The Economist, PricewaterhouseCoopers has taken a lead from Google and has been known to use Lego when recruiting at British universities asking potential recruits build a tower using the smallest number of bricks. In South Korea one company gets recruits to climb a hill, in order to identify potential leaders and see how people will react in given situations. British company B&Q encountered criticism in early 2007 when potential recruits were asked to dance to a Jackson Five song.

While the union said the practice was "demeaning and irrelevant", the company said it was "to make sure candidates were relaxed before the interview process." Nicola Monson, of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), in London, supported the company on this occasion, saying, "Companies are beginning to look further than just the skills and competencies to do the job. This (dancing) is a creative and innovative way of checking that people have the right attitude to fit in with the company's culture." Finding creative ways of looking beyond core competencies, without crossing the line into the irrelevant is a headache for recruiters.

Many spend fortunes differentiating the right staff for their positions, working within a legal framework (particularly in the US and EU) that prevents indulgent recruitment practices. Businesses also spend time and energy promoting their unique company culture. Google wants to be associated with fun and creativity, so Lego is the perfect tool. B&Q suffered very little from the dancing escapade and it could be that its corporate image is seen as less stuffy as a direct result. Perhaps there is no such thing as bad press! For Tom Adam, a California-based contract recruiter who has worked for several high-tech industries, the problem is validity. "I'm afraid many recruiters who use these approaches don't make an effort to validate them. They'll make assumptions about their validity, but rarely provide solid data to support these methods."

The point is, if an unconventional approach doesn't accurately predict success, it is not a useful exercise. Do B&Q operatives need to be good dancers to be good workers? Will a South Korean, who shows leadership skills on a mountain, replicate this on the shop floor? Tom Adam continues, "If a recruiter asks a candidate what kind of tree they would be, they'll suggest they're evaluating the candidate's creativity, looking for what qualities that tree has that the candidate believes they have. However, they don't have much evidence that such questions actually measure those characteristics, and even if they did, where's the correlation with being a  successful employee?

The interview process should result in a confidence as to which candidate has the characteristics to be a successful employee. I have not found a better way to evaluate this than behavioural interviewing. Since the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour, one needs to know what a candidate has actually done in various situations, not what they say they would do in a given situation." James Thompson, lead talent search partner at AstraZeneca in the UK agrees. "We're looking for people with certain skills and experience to attract people who will flourish and identifying those that will not. There are techniques we'll use such as psychometric testing and motivational questioning and these give us an idea of how an individual will interact, which people take control and who the ideas people are.

We wouldn't make a decision on how someone builds a bridge out of Lego, but it could be used as part of the process." It's unlikely that businesses are trying to create mere gimmicks to attract recruits. After all, work is a serious business and an overly flippant approach could be counter-productive. However, many are realising that innovation requires doing things a little differently and doing things a little differently could also be what the potential recruits of the future want from companies today.