Firm reveals 22-hour job interview to weed out fakers

We’ve all heard of some pretty gruelling job interviews in our time – perhaps it involved several stages, tests or even the dreaded ‘curveball’ questions. Can you describe the sky without using colours?

Now a new standard appears to have been set for the most challenging interviews. To get a job with Australian app development firm Appster you must navigate a 22 hour application process consisting of eight stages, four interviews, up to ten reference checks and even a body language assessment.

Appster co-founder and CEO, Josiah Humphrey, says that the firm needs to be rigorous in its hiring. Speaking to news.com.au, he said it was “scary how often people can con their way in”.

He said that before the company introduced such strenuous processes they were regularly hiring the wrong person.

“If I go back to our first year, year-and-a-half, we were finding the right candidate maybe 25% of the time,” he says. “That doesn’t mean we’d fire them, but we might have to change the role, train them up, change our expectations.”

He says that the figure is now more like 80% - significantly higher than the industry average of around 30%.

Humphrey, 23, tells of an applicant “freaking out” during the initial screening interview when called out on inconsistencies in his story.

“This guy looked great on paper but I was fact-checking some of his claims as we were talking. I told him I thought he was being dishonest, and he freaks out and hangs up the phone.

“Two years ago we would have hired this guy.”


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Comments (7)

  • Bret
    Bret
    Wed, 7 Oct 2015 10:08am BST
    Sounds like a great place NOT to work
  • Julia Cook
    Julia Cook
    Thu, 19 Mar 2015 1:11pm GMT
    Wouldn't it be better all round i.e., quicker, cheaper & more reliable to use a psychometric like the Giotto test?

    http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/services/psychometric-tests/giotto
  • Bob Smitt
    Bob Smitt
    Mon, 16 Mar 2015 3:16pm GMT
    22 hours... I think I'm with the majority when I say it's the interviewer at fault if it takes that long.
    I completely agree that you need to be thorough, fact check, cross reference what they say with the CV etc. etc. I regularly "call" people on inconsistencies; 1) to get the facts & 2) to see how they react & deal with the pressure...
    As an interviewer though, if you are remotely intelligent & know what you're doing, you'll catch the applicants that are trying to blag their way through... and it does not take anywhere near 22 hours! I wonder how on Earth he & his staff find the time to bother...
  • Chuck Blakeman
    Chuck Blakeman@ ChrisJS
    Thu, 5 Mar 2015 6:01pm GMT
    We teach companies to do a 10-step hiring process that can take 4-7 weeks, even for part-time people. Universally, it's the best process they've found for hiring. The biggest advantage is that it quickly wees out people who only want a "job", not work. When you create work just to get the position, you find out what motivates people.

    Every person we hired the traditional way from 2006-2011 was fired or quit. In the last four years we have zero percent voluntary turnover (after two years w/ one person, we let her go and got her a job elsewhere immediately).

    Other firms who use non-traditional hiring do just as well. Semco has 3,000 people and their turnover is an unheard of 1-2% per year and there aren't

    Invest more time up front, you avoid hiring the wrong people. Duh.
  • joanne
    joanne
    Mon, 23 Feb 2015 9:17am GMT
    We all make hiring mistakes from time to time but to make 75% mistakes really says that the person who is doing the recruitment job is in the wrong role (possibly another incorrect hire?). Perhaps they are not good at reading people, or perhaps they are too trusting. Either way, this says more about the lack of ability of the recruitment function in this firm than it does of the 'tryers' who are not 100% honest at interview. What a charade!

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