When you’re hiring someone, you need to consider how they will fit into corporate culture. Sometimes you’ll have trouble figuring that out. Try imagining if you’d like to have a beer with them after work.
Photo by tedxgrandrapids
The Muse offers a few ideas on choosing among many qualified candidates. Part of any job is the social interactions, both during work and after:
which of the two would you rather have a beer with after work? There’s no way you can know everything about how a candidate will interact on a daily basis, but you can usually get a pretty good sense based on your gut reaction to whether you’d want to hang out with him or her.
Don’t base an employment decision on just this limited test, of course. Apply this test when everything else checks out and you’re struggling to find the right candidate. If you don’t drink beer, try thinking about having lunch with them or a nice coffee break.
Comments
2 responses to “Try The ‘Beer Test’ To Make A Hiring Decision”
Stupid idea. You don’t hire friends, you’re hiring workers. If you need to decide who you’re going to hire because you want to know who may be a future drinking buddy then you’re an idiot and you’re company with be the ones to regret it.
If you decision is difficult or impossible, flip a coin. Literally. If you truly, honestly, unequivocally believe you cannot make the decision yourself, save for some arbitrary “test” of who’s your friend, then flip a coin.
not necessarily. It is after all meant to be more a test of assessing how someone will fit into a particular workplace’s culture. Certainly it doesn’t apply to all jobs but there are quite a few where it would.
True. Though having done work as a labourer(2 year) and then also doing business and working in the Government & Enterprise(8 years) sector I can’t say where it would fit.
Rather too much is made of ‘culture’ in a workplace. One of the dangers of ‘fit’ is that you end up with a monochromatic culture where errors can easily propogate without challenge. Go for diversity instead; and I don’t refer here to diversity of complexion, surname origin or other such fluff, but diversity of intellectual background, opinions, qualifications. Then the basic rule of work life prevails: be polite to everyone, converse respectfully, seek contrary opinions and ask that they be well put.