Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had a 'beer test' he would use for interviewing people at company
Steve Jobs, the late CEO and founder of tech giant Apple, allegedly conducted a 'beer test' to help him decide which prospective employees were worth hiring.
You'd expect a job interview at Apple to be a pretty formal process with stern interviewers and a nervous interviewee - Which is usually the case.
However, Jobs reportedly scrapped this more traditional approach with his own inventive way of finding new staff.
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Which, if you ask us, sounds like great idea! We can only imagine how daunting it would be to go through the application process for such a major company.
According to as.com, the Apple legend, known for inventing the one of the most popular smartphones ever, wanted to 'break' away from the typical interviewing process that involved candidates turning up to be asked a series of standard questions followed with rehearsed answers.
For this very reason, Jobs dropped all formalities and kept it pretty casual.
Instead of just 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 actually put it to the test.
Jobs would reportedly take his potential employees for a walk and for a quick drink in order to decide whether or not they'd be a good hire.
As you can imagine, this helped remove the formality from the situation hugely, causing candidates to relax and give more honest answers they might have held back from doing initially.
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 laid back questions were almost like something an old friend would ask, and helped the pair become aquatinted pretty quickly.
He didn’t exactly look for any right or wrong answers but just aimed to get to know the candidate better.
Jobs’ unique interviewing process was to find the very best of the best, the ‘A-Players’ as he'd call them.
And from the success of his company, he must've been doing something right!
Jobs 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.”