For all but the most social among us, mandated “fun” in the workplace is one of the working world’s most nightmarish features. Ask any introverted friend of yours, and they’ll likely tell you they’d rather drink acid than go on an office outing.
That’s likely why a viral LinkedIn post from a tech CEO about using mandated fun in lieu of job interviews has several people online up in arms despite it being satire. Not only does it feel completely plausible in today’s job market, but it’s actually a long-running trend.
The CEO posted about using escape rooms for job interviews and refusing to hire anyone who fails.
Did you just jump out of your skin like I did? Job searching is already so anxiety-inducing that to add not just socialization but the kind of socialization that potentially involves face-planting in front of a bunch of strangers sounds like a literal waking nightmare.
So when a LinkedIn post about using escape rooms as an alternative to job interviews went viral recently, quite a few people online were immediately angry. Like, really? Is this what we’re doing now?
Apparently so, if tech entrepreneur Alex Cohen’s LinkedIn post which later showed up in subReddits like r/LinkedInLunatics, is any indication.
“At our new company, we have stopped conducting traditional interviews for new candidates,” he wrote. “Instead, we put eight candidates at a time in an escape room and observe how they problem-solve among strangers to escape.”
It’s not bad enough that you have to apply to hundreds of jobs to even get an interview in the first place, but now you also have to go be social with strangers in an escape room?! This is sadistic!
The post is (thankfully!) satire. But in today’s job market, it feels unsettlingly realistic.
Never underestimate the internet’s inability to detect satire, though Cohen’s is so subtly written you can maybe forgive people for taking it seriously. But even more convincing is how not at all unrealistic his post sounds.
After explaining how his company, a healthcare tech start-up, has dispensed with interviews in favor of torturing candidates at escape rooms, Cohen went on to say that he watches the proceedings from a hidden “control room” like some nefarious overlord in a lair. There, he evaluates them “using a criteria matrix I paid McKinsey to develop that assesses their ability to solve problems, lead, make decisions, avoid red herrings, and communicate.”
The reference to McKinsey is the first real tell that this is satire — the management consulting firm is frequently mocked online for being the kind of place corporations pay gazillions of dollars to make Powerpoints full of eminently dumb ideas like… well, using escape rooms for job interviews.
From here, Cohen took an even more nefarious turn, writing how “the useless half [of candidates] is immediately eliminated from the interview process.” It’s as if Dr. Evil were a business guru.
“So far it’s been working great and we’ve managed to hire only 10x engineers” Cohen continued, referencing a decades-long joke in tech about magical unicorn engineers who are supposedly 10 times more productive than average. “Follow me for more hiring advice.”
Using escape rooms for job interviews is an actual thing though — and it’s a perfect example of how wrong-headed the business world is.
It may have been satire, but Cohen’s post feels real because it essentially is, both in spirit and in the literal sense.
In 2017, a realtor wrote in Huffington Post about how he was “tired of traditional job interviews” and planned to begin using escape rooms as an antidote to the “practiced statements and small talk… [that] tell me nothing about the candidate.”
Many escape rooms now include such services on their websites as an offering to businesses. HR and job search gurus online have recommended holding interviews in escape rooms as a means for employers to test “real-time problem solving” and “stress management” among other skills. (Perhaps it was they who inspired Cohen’s pithy post.)
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It’s an idea not just patently absurd but out of step with the realities of both the job market and human nature. Sure, someone might be able to navigate an escape room cool as a cucumber, but what on Earth does that have to do with their ability to manage the stress of deadlines and client demands? It’s apples to oranges.
It’s in the same vein as using SAT scores as a measure of intelligence. Lots of geniuses are just bad test-takers. And lots of idiots are good at puzzles like escape rooms!
Unless your business IS an escape room, this seems like a colossal waste of everyone’s time—and a great way to weed out potentially terrific candidates who are not good at an arbitrary process that has nothing to do with sitting in a cubicle making spreadsheets.
It’s the kind of dunderheaded idea that ONLY an out-of-touch business executive could ever come up with. Here’s hoping they clock Cohen’s satire instead of getting any more ridiculous ideas.
Finding a job is hard enough already without playing these kinds of games.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.
