Essien is now pioneering the ‘Detective and Pattern-Matcher’ method‘Looking to employ full-time genius. Job description: Be smarter than 95% of people in world…’
That’s the bold new twitter recruitment strategy of Mark Essien, CEO of Hotels.ng – the largest hotel booking platform in Nigeria.
Candidates are asked to brave a raft of theoretical mind-teasers such as:
‘If Van Gogh and Mozart would have been in the crowd listening to the famous Mark Anthony speech on the death of Julius Caesar (as written by Shakespeare), what would have been their comments?’
Or how about:
‘Which of these two is faster: Superman or The Flash?’
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“On a whim I decided to try posting a job application on Twitter ‘only for geniuses’,” recalls Essien – speaking to CNN. “The task was to apply for an unspecified job in 10 words only. As it turned out, even though it was just 10 words, the quality of the applications was way better than all we had to date.
“After a back-and-forth with a series of difficult questions, we got our first hire: Justin Irabor, our Head of Content Marketing.
“The interview questions were published online, and there was a lot of feedback that the questions were biased towards good writers only. So we did a second set of questions – this time selecting the questions to bias towards people that would be good at operations. We had another amazing set of answers and we ended up with another employee – someone very different from Justin. He became our Head of Finance.
“He knew very little about finance, but the theory turned out to be quite true; anyone smart enough will rapidly learn to handle things. Femi, the new hire, has increased the efficiency of the department from the low 70% to above 90%.”
Not content with breaking the recruitment mould with these two appointments, Essien is now pioneering the ‘Detective and Pattern-Matcher’ method. Three candidates are already through to the next round… for a job that they know nothing about.
They have answered questions including:
‘Is it true that some people can only make blueprints; some can only execute blueprints? Why?’
“We don’t give further details of the job; the assumption is that anyone that is a great detective will be able to do the job”, adds Essien – elaborating on his ‘Sherlockian’ approach to workforce expansion.
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