Every recruiter has different parameters to gauge the competence level of a candidate. Reviewing a candidate for a particular job is not easy. To be able to make the right choice, along with many other parameters, a recruiter also has to ensure that the person will fit right into the work culture.
Well, to make sure the candidate adapts really well in a particular work culture, a boss came up with a rather unique idea to screen the candidates. He deploys a coffee cup test each time he interviews a person. Curious to know more? Well, businessman Trent Innes, former managing director of accounting platform Xeno and now the chief growth officer at SiteMinder, on a business podcast The Ventures, mentioned that he always takes a candidate to one of their kitchens and invariably it so happens that the candidate walks away with a drink. He further went on to add that towards the end of the interview, he also sees if the interviewee takes the empty cup back to the kitchen. So, the whole idea of doing the coffee cup test is to see if the candidate is the right fit for the company.
Innes added, "You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge and experience, but it really does come down to attitude, and the attitude that we talk a lot about is the concept of 'wash your coffee cup'. If you come into the office one day inside Xero, you'll see the kitchens are almost always clean and sparkling and it's very much off that concept of wash your coffee cup. It's really just making sure that they're actually going to fit into the culture inside Xero, and really take on everything that they should be doing."
It goes without saying that his approach has people befuddled. A lot of them opined that his approach to selecting candidates was too arbitrary. Some also said that since the candidate is not on the payroll of a company or has an iota of an idea about its work culture, having this assumption in the first place was presumptuous at best. What do you think of this? Let us know in the comments below.