Dyson challenges

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QUESTION

What are some interesting ways challenges/ competitions have been structured?

INSIGHTS

Many competitions and challenges similar to Dyson's "ReThinkers" hiring method are geared towards video game designers, engineers, and programmers.

Challenges like Dyson's "ReThinkers" campaign take the form of crossword puzzles, web-based challenges, and other methods that typically relate to hiring or recruiting.

One of the most famous historical instances of a recruitment-based competition was the code-breaking facility at Bletchley Park during World War II, in charge of cracking Enigma, the Nazi encoding machine.

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OVERVIEW

Hello! Thank you for your question about challenges that are interestingly structured and how to apply them. The short version is that many major companies, such as Dyson and Google, have taken advantage of competitions, secret hiring methods, and other creative recruitment methods. Google is arguably the most famous of these, but there are other options and methods to work with.

METHODOLOGY I started by looking into the company that created the video for Dyson, Livity, and any other projects they are currently undertaking. After that, I looked into Google, which I already knew to conduct secret hirings and competitions for job interviews. From there, I expanded the scope to the methods those companies use to choose the best possible candidates while keeping it interesting. Below, I begin with a historical example, then work my way through different companies' competitions or campaigns, followed by elaboration on trends. The majority of these competitions are technologically driven.

HISTORICALLY This kind of recruitment process is historically relevant: recently, Benedict Cumberbatch renewed American interest in the secrets of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park, in charge of cracking Enigma, the Nazi encoding machine used throughout World War II. The code-breakers were hired beginning in late 1938 (1), with some directly offered the position because of their standing as a prominent mathematician or professor. Others, however, completed a challenging crossword puzzle placed in The Daily Telegraph (2) in 1942.

GOOGLE The search engine company is notorious for its intense hiring methods, and Laszlo Bock, VP of People Operations (HR), went through Google's five primary hiring traits. (3) Quoted below: "1. The ability to learn and pull together disparate pieces of information on the fly 2. Emergent leadership skills, in which employees take leadership roles in a team when appropriate and then step back and let someone else lead 3. Ownership of work and projects 4. The humility to accept the better ideas of others and to take a strong position but then change in the face of new facts

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5. Last, and least, is expertise, because the answers may be obvious to an intelligent person and habitual practice might skip useful new answers" They acquire their brilliant minds through a variety of interview types, some conventional and some not. For example, Max Rosett (4) got his job at Google just over a year ago and it all began with a simple search: "While working on a project, . . . Googled 'python lambda function list comprehension' . . .

The familiar blue links appeared . . . But then something unusual happened. The search results split and folded back to reveal a box that said 'You’re speaking our language. Up for a challenge?'" Rosett accepted the challenge, which led to a series of complex programming challenges, all conducted in a UNIX style window. Down the line, after completing the five challenges, he was contacted by a recruiter who took him through a standard interview process.

What makes this remarkable is that Rosett had not even completed his master's degree at the time of being contacted by the recruiter. Typically, a company as massive as Google would require any serious applicant to have a master's degree and several years of experience before being seriously considered a contender.

OGILVYONE Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising company based out of New York, proposed a challenge in 2010 for the "World's Greatest Salesperson." (5) The prize was a paid trip to the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. The challenge? "To sell a common, ordinary brick" through a YouTube video. A few months later, the winner was announced (6). Todd Herman is an "international performance coaching and training expert from Edmonton, Canada," who received "a three month fellowship at OgilvyOne Worldwide to help craft a sales guide to the 21st century," as well as the trip to the Cannes Lions Festival.

As far as the competition itself (6), "The World’s Greatest Salesperson contest grew out of OgilvyOne’s mission to reinvigorate the noble art of salesmanship and the credo of its founder David Ogilvy who said, 'We sell, or else.'"

RED 5 Gaming industry startup RED 5 "was under the gun to hire a top notch team" because of its fast approaching launch deadline. This is why RED 5 launched the Golden Ticket Program, which involved sending 100 unmarked packages to "100 of the brightest game developers with a special recruitment message (8) on an iPod from the CEO." In the 3/6

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package was a series of boxes, the last of which was a red box with the number 5 on it. In that box was an iPod mini with the recipient's name engraved on it, as well as a URL to a personalized website, and one single track. The track was personalized to the recipient, and informed them of exactly why the company had reached out to them. The intention was for the recipient to be in the dark about the purposes of the package until the last moment.

The suspense was due in part to how often experienced game designers would be asked to join another company. RED 5 had to figure out a way to be different, and it certainly worked (8): "within a few days, 99 of the recruits had looked at the website. 15 scheduled interviews, which resulted in 3 new hires." It cost RED 5 $50,000 to do all of the research on the potential employees; acquire the supplies for the boxes, packages, and golden tickets; and all of the labor and cost involved with the iPods and individual websites.

TRENDS In all, the majority of these competitions are geared towards the recruitment of engineers, programmers, and innovators. Growing trends (9) in these recruitment fields include gamification and in-your-face challenges.

Gamification (9) is "the use of gaming principles and design in non-gaming situations."

Marriott is a prime example of a gamification promoter, using their 'My Marriott Hotel' software as "an educational tool (10), whilst at the same time, increases brand awareness.

Francesca Martinez, HR VP at Marriott, says this of the game: “First, players manage a ‘virtual’ hotel restaurant kitchen. They buy equipment and ingredients on a budget, hire and train employees, and serve guests. Points are earned for happy customers, lost for poor service and ultimately, players are rewarded when their operation turns a profit.

Then they are able to move on to other areas of hotel operations.”

An example of an in-your-face challenge would be Quixey's One Minute Challenge (11), where engineers were challenged to solve a problem in one minute. If they succeeded, they won $100. They could do this one day each month, and this influx of new talent helped Quixey, only a Silicon Valley startup at the time, recognize talented engineers.

Another example of this would be Google's billboard challenge (11) in 2004. One of them was in the very center of Silicon Valley. At the time, it was an anonymous billboard that only read: "{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com." Anyone who cracked that code and went to the website was faced with another puzzle. Eventually, 4/6

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those who persisted through the puzzles and came out on the other end with the correct answers were given a chance at an interview with Google at their headquarters.

While this is not an in-your-face example in the abstract sense, it is in the literal sense. The challenge is not so literal as it is in many of the other examples; the challenge is noticing it. In an effort to reach new, young talent, Volkswagen "sent 'undercover' employees (12) to drop off damaged cars at repair shops across Germany. On the undercarriage of each car was a job ad." The recruiters were undercover dropping off the damaged cars, which allowed them to interact with the potential employee. The challenge posed by Volkswagen was one of skill in their trade and attentiveness.

CONCLUSION To wrap it up, there are many emerging challenges similar in nature to the Dyson recruitment project. Google is probably the closest to Livity's campaign on behalf of Dyson. They vary from very obvious challenges, such as Google's 2004 billboard campaign to more subtle messages such as RED 5's search for qualified talent, which challenges successful workers in a field to stay on their toes.

Thank you for asking Wonder! Please let us know if we can help you with anything else!

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SOURCES

1) The Early History of Bletchley Park

https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/hist/worldwartwo/captridley.rhtm

2) The Daily Telegraph: Bletchley Park

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/11151478/Could-you-have-been-a-codebreaker-atBletchley-Park.html

3) Google's 5 Secret Hiring Principles

http://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/google-secret-principles-for-outstanding-hiring.html

4) Google's Secret Interview: Max Rosett http://thehustle.co/the-secret-google-interview-that-landed-me-a-job

5) OgilvyOne Contest for World's Greatest Salesperson http://www.ogilvy.com/News/Press-Releases/March-2010-Worlds-Greatest-Salesperson.aspx

6) Ogilvy Challenge Winner: Todd Herman http://www.ogilvy.com/News/Press-Releases/June-2010-Todd-Herman-Voted-Worlds-GreatestSalesperson.aspx

7) RED 5 Golden Ticket Project http://www.nbcnews.com/id/21134540/vp/24836769#24836769

8) #5: RED 5 Recruitment Strategy https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/top-10-most-innovative-recruitment-campaigns-yumna-bahgat

9) 7 Innovative Ways to Be a Creative Recruiter http://www.hrmorning.com/creative-recruiting-land-dream-hire/

10) My Marriott Hotel http://www.mysteryapplicant.com/2012/08/15/companies-get-creative-three-ways-to-use-social-media-toattract-top-talent/

11) Quixey's One Minute Challenge and Google's Billboard http://www.hrmorning.com/creative-recruiting-land-dream-hire/3/

12) Volkswagen's Way of Hiring http://www.hrmorning.com/creative-recruiting-land-dream-hire/2/

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