Steve Jobs had a clever 'beer test' he would use for interviewing people at Apple
You might wish all interviews were like this.
Running a multi-trillion dollar tech company certainly doesn’t sound like an easy feat, and it’s sure to come with huge stresses and pressures.
But Steve Jobs, the late CEO and founder of tech giant Apple, apparently had a clever way of making sure he was surrounded by a team of 'A-Players' to make sure the company ran smoothly and cohesively.
The interesting technique, known as the ‘beer test’, would help Jobs decide which prospective employees were worth hiring to ensure he had a solid team around him at the company.
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Instead of interviewing potential candidates in the traditional way - sitting around a table in a stuffy room while firing off questions - Jobs went for a much more relaxed and laid-back approach when sussing out his future employees.
According to Spanish sport wesbite as.com, the tech legend would reportedly take his interviewees for a walk and a quick drink in order to decide whether or not to hire them - taking the thought process of ‘would I have a beer with this person?’ quite literally.
The easy-going method allowed Jobs to get to know the candidate on a genuine level and the individual would in turn give more honest answers to questions - that they might not have given in a meeting room while feeling tense and nervous.
The Apple founder would reportedly ask the interviewees questions such as ‘when was the last time you accomplished something’, and ‘what did you do last summer?’
Instead of searching for any right or wrong answers, Jobs would simply try and get to know the candidate better.
The relaxed nature of the questions, along with the environment in which Jobs would use to interview candidates, ultimately made the pair become acquainted much quicker.
Jobs himself explained that the unique method helped him to compile a team who really enjoyed working together.
In the documentary Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, he reportedly said: “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. And they don’t want to work with B and C players and so it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates."