Initially, we had a hypothesis that it would be played mainly by yesterday's students or those with little experience. But in practice, the list of participants included directors, professors and many other people who are already settled in life. Why did they do it? Good question. The partial answer is that not everything is decided by position or money.
Under the cut is the analysis of our spring case, which may turn out to be interesting to the âeycharsâ of large companies and those who are looking for not just a job, but their vocation.
Why the link "applicant-resume-recruiter" is outdated
The world of job seekers and employers is in constant flux. The first ones hone their resumes, wanting to find a decent job, realize and develop their talents, get a well-deserved reward and, of course, move up the career ladder. The latter spend sleepless nights looking among the millions of proposals for such employees who understand the task and do not disrupt deadlines.
The last word always rests with the employer - it is he who makes the final choice. And in this there is some injustice in relation to the potential employee.
By and large, all that a candidate can do to make himself known is to write a resume and hope that the employer will somehow miraculously see between the lines of a dry profile of a promising employee.
Unfortunately, the employer is not a telepathic person, and therefore often evaluates candidates intuitively and very, very subjectively. In this matter, even an experienced HR expert can make a mistake in the assessment, not taking into account the personal characteristics of the candidate. A specialist, for example, falls into a âcommon teamâ, and suddenly all his positive qualities become invisible.
And here the point is not at all that talents were embellished in the applicant's resume. It's just that this applicant, for example, a potential leader, and his place is at the head of the team, and in any other positions he will be ineffective.
The second problem that stands in the way of successful hiring is aptitude test. After all, it is one thing to declare your skills, and quite another to prove them in practice.
The main idea is to revive the cases
To help build an optimal relationship between the applicant and the employer, we tried to solve several difficult problems.
- Find the answer to the question: how to check the potential of a candidate for a vacancy? Often, the applicant himself incorrectly defines his strengths and weaknesses - he needs help in this.
- By submitting his application to a recruiting agency, a person can both overestimate and underestimate his abilities. How to understand what he can really do?
- No modern project is done alone. Therefore, it is very important to know if the candidate is able to effectively cope with the assigned tasks together with other people.
On reflection, we came to the conclusion that there is only one way to answer these important questions - by looking at the candidates in the case (this thought from the cap gives us a chance to look at everything in a new way).
Obviously, we need some kind of environment where a person could confirm the declared professional skills, talents, and also demonstrate personal qualities in teamwork.
It would also be great if this system facilitated the rapid advancement of promising applicants within this test environment. As a result, a few years ago we created the first version of our open selection competition.
What is the trick
We held the first Open Selection in 2012. The main idea was to create a working environment for job seekers as close as possible to real "combat conditions". Candidates got into the work environment with tasks, a phased project delivery plan and, most importantly, a team of like-minded people. With the latter, you have to find a common language, conduct a brainstorming session, look for constructive solutions, argue, yield, if necessary, motivate.
Until this year, all selections were in-person. Participants submitted applications, and then came to where the main stage took place. We suspected that we were losing the best candidates on this, who are doing great, and there is no incentive to drop everything and fly to the competition.
This year, for well-known reasons, we could not conduct the "Open selection" offline. We relaunched the entire competition from scratch, moved everything online, introduced new scripts, wrote a Telegram bot. Perhaps it is for this reason that they set a record for the number of participants - more than four thousand people came to the competition. How do you like this, coronavirus?
The new format consisted of three stages and went on for a month and a half. We started on March 2, and summed up the results on April 20.
- First stage, 30 days. Participants registered, wrote their cases, assessed other people's cases, took online courses and tests.
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During the team marathon, candidates had to choose one of 9 technological areas: education, drones, cars, neurotechnology ( NTI markets , for example AeroNet - for those who develop and use drones), come up with a project idea, make a presentation for investors and make up a landing page.
The potential of each group could be discerned from the very beginning. The array of data that we received after the second stage allowed us to build a bunch of interesting infographics. It turned out that those who did not spend a lot of time getting to know each other and quickly went through the stage of preparing the presentation, coped with the landing page of their project twice as fast. But in general, the time spent by the teams looked like this:
And so we displayed the number of active participants in the chats:
And for low activity, the teams were reduced points.
Finalists fought not for specific vacancies, but for groups
The usual personnel competition resembles a "pig in a poke": accepting its conditions, each participant makes a choice in favor of a specific position. There is a risk that this choice will not justify expectations - relations with the employer will not develop, preferences will change, or this particular vacancy will be occupied. In the Open Selection, we acted differently.
We have combined similar vacancies into tracks. Track is a direction that requires specific knowledge and skills from a candidate: knowledge of laws, education market or marketing principles. It turned out 12 tracks with 36 vacancies. Participants could calmly work with their cases, and only at the last, third stage of the competition, did they choose a vacancy that they liked.
Who are the participants
In comparison with similar selections conducted earlier, the geography of participants has expanded. The current selection covered 76 regions of Russia, and more than half of all applications for participation in the competition were received from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Rostov-on-Don and Kazan.
The youngest - 16 years old, he applied for a brand manager, and the most experienced - 69, he chose the position of the head of educational programs. For comparison: in the last Selection, the scatter in age was only 20 years old, and the oldest member of the team was 48.
Initially, we believed that the main goal of participation would be those very vacancies. However, for some participants in the Open Selection, job offers were not particularly needed. Many of them have already taken place in their field as specialists. These people saw the opportunity to pass this challenge rather as a way to gain new experience and confirm their competence.
The teams included professors, psychologists, company leaders, students, and teachers. For example, Andrey Korabelnikov - Doctor of Science, Professor. Developed scientific and educational projects. Founded three startups. In the Open Selection, he was on the EduTechPlace team, where he was responsible for the technical solutions of the project and the search for innovations.
Team Leader - Dmitry Kozyrev... At one time he was engaged in the preparation of mass social events in St. Petersburg, studied psychology and the basics of psychoanalysis. Currently he is the director of an online furniture store. The purpose of his participation in the Selection, in his own words, is to search for a launching pad for introducing new social initiatives. In other words, a person was looking for where else to direct energy.
Cases: reorganization of Russian Post and Marussia motors
Each participant worked on his own case, and although these were mostly hypothetical problems, the participants enjoyed finding solutions. And some projects went beyond the competition.
For example, in the second round of the Selection, the members of one of the teams turned their task into a real technology startup focused on the corporate training market. In just ten and a half hours, they figured out how to develop a versatile and open source virtual and augmented reality learning platform. In their opinion, this idea can be used to train and retrain engineers.
An example of working in mixed reality glasses Microsoft HoloLens 2
When they told what specific steps they took after the final of the competition to launch their project, we decided that this experience would be useful for those who have a startup idea - by the way, we made a separate article about them in Zen.
There were other interesting tasks, over the solution of which the participants of the Selection had to rack their brains. For example, how to reorganize the holding, which includes Russian Post, Marussia motors and the Moscow Innovation Cluster? Another challenge: to offer an educational program for members of the government. It was necessary to develop the concept of this program, to think over the composition of the speakers who should be invited and those who should not be invited in any case, and in the end it was necessary to estimate how much this pleasure would cost.
It was also funny to watch how another team from the Selection solved the problem with an interesting case of developing rooms of the future. The contestants had to give a clear answer: which technological solutions will definitely be included in it, and which will never be. And one more thing: how to ensure the capacity of 1 million people a year. Most relied on technological innovations, gadgets, âsmart homeâ, environmental friendliness and customization for the visitor. The room was even offered to be located in the Moscow metro. The participants seemed to have foreseen everything! Wooden furniture, sounds of nature, blah blah blah. But the expert's comment returned the enthusiastic romantics to the earth: "Everything is as it should be, AR, AI, big data and so on ... People, where is the TOILET? !!"
No points rating system
In order not to drain the competition and make it look like dry personnel selection by conservative methods, we had to rebuild the mechanics of evaluating candidates. No numbers, only a binary rating system - yes or no. We called the team and individual ratings leaderboards.
Team card number 56: composition, statistics, activity
We also decided to add a provocative feature and gave participants the opportunity to rate other people's cases. We reported in the conditions of the competition that for an objective assessment, the contestants will receive additional points. How exactly objectivity will be determined, coinciding with the opinion of experts or other participants, was not reported. As a result, the innovation did not reveal the worst aspects of human nature. None of the candidates tried to raise their rating, lowering the competitor. After the vote count, it turned out that the opinion of the participants almost coincided with the expert assessment and differed only by a few percent.
As for the second stage of the Open Selection, here we also did not complicate the calculation of the assessment and therefore left only two main criteria by which it was possible to draw an objective conclusion about the work done: the effectiveness of the team and its cohesion.
Of course, there were complaints about the assessment system. Nevertheless, it can be considered that the principle justified itself, because the dissatisfaction of individual participants was caused rather by their place in the rating, and not by the approach to scoring. We adopted the experience gained and, when the competition ended, we used it for two new services.
Personal opinion
We did the selection not only for the solution of the problem of hiring. When I was looking for my very first job myself, I did the same as most young ambitious students. She filled out the paper a hundred times, with all her might she invented at least some merit. For a very long time I figured out what to write in the column "Experience" when it really wasn't there. And in all seriousness, every time I wrote a new essay on the topic "Why I want to work for you."
A series of unsuccessful attempts at the device then hurt my self-esteem. I think that partly for this reason Open selection has taken exactly the forms that we have come to now.
For many participants, the contest became a kind of social elevator: it made it possible to âlight upâ with the most sensible and self-confident, get in touch, build a team for your own projects.
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After the selection, we received dozens of requests for help in selecting employees. A week later, they decided to make a platform for finding employees based on the Open selection. As a result, we quickly launched the Longpoll service for employers.
Everything is in it, as it was at the competition: non-standard questions for candidates, an automatic scoring system with an unlimited number of factors, team tasks, development recommendations for participants. There is a free version and an advanced paid version, if the employer wants to create such a competition personally for his requests and monitor the candidates in the workflow.
Visual images of 12 directions in which we were looking for employees this year
Open selection in education
We have always used the Open selection to find new employees, but the last competition gave an unexpected result: the St. Petersburg Polytechnic offered to organize an entrance campaign for the magistracy in the Open selection format.
As a result, we developed a selection program for âTechnology Leadership and Entrepreneurshipâ and turned the traditional exam into a competition. It is interesting to participate in it regardless of the result, but, of course, a competition without a prize is not a competition, so Russian winners will receive an offer to study for free, and foreign winners will receive a discount on training.
There are several advantages that we see in this approach.
Firstly, each participant has the right to make a mistake and there are many chances to win. Open selection for the program enables participants to earn points for a wide variety of activities.
Secondly, there are no âblack boxesâ. All information about the ratings of applicants is open and available in your personal account, so you can always realistically assess your chances of success.
Thirdly, the team stage of the Selection takes place in the Telegram, the usual messenger for applicants, which they use daily.
Fourthly, this program teaches practitioners who, in 2 years, will graduate from a magistracy with a working startup, therefore they are looking for students who are active and warmed up.
We are happy for the Polytech, we are waiting for the start of the new team stage, we hope that the format will be useful to other companies that are ready to hold large-scale competitions and selections.