Turned down over a coffee cup

Dear readers,

Have you heard of the “coffee cup test”? During an interview, a candidate is offered a coffee, to see if they spontaneously offer to clean it up on the way out. When a colleague told us about it the other day, he introduced us to the whole world of so-called “hidden tests”. Most of them aren’t scandalous. In fact some just involve common sense: if a recruiter gives you the “lunch test” at short notice, avoid drinking alcohol. Others are likely urban legends, such as the “chair test”, in which candidates are said to be assessed on their degree of tolerance to an unstable chair. Others relate to common decency – I particularly like the “receptionist test”, in which a recruitment manager is in fact disguised as a receptionist. But what happens when a recruiter makes candidates work on an impossible exercise to gauge their foresight, or when they abruptly leave in the middle of an interview to test their composure? Are these secret tests a form of manipulation, or fair evaluation tactics?

On this question, two sides are opposed. On the one hand, those who are outraged and who argue that it’s immoral to choose a candidate on criteria that go beyond the explicit content of the interview. For them, those being assessed have a right to transparency: it’s a question of basic respect. They would agree with Immanuel Kant that “an action done from duty has its moral worth, not in the purpose to be attained by it, but in the maxim in accordance with which it is decided upon.” In short, if the “maxim” or intention behind our action is to trick the candidate, then the entire action is worthy of blame, even if its consequences are beneficial for the company. To not inform the person that they’re being assessed is the same as lying to them. French labour legislation tends to support this view: recruiters are allowed to test candidates, but this must be done transparently and with their consent. And “prior to their implementation,” the candidate should be informed as to “the recruitment assistance methods and techniques used in this respect.”

‘Activity or inactivity, speech or silence, everything has the value of a message’

—Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick Beavin, and Don D. Jackson

Others protest: what hypocrisy to claim that everything in the assessment could be explained! It’s all part of the recruitment process: from the moment we enter it, we know that we’re being evaluated, and not just during the interview itself. As the behaviourist theorists of the “Palo Alto school” Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick Beavin, and Don D. Jackson explain in their 1967 book, Pragmatics of Human Communication, all behaviour is communication, and since one cannot not behave, one cannot not communicate: “Activity or inactivity, speech or silence, everything has a message value.” Whether you leave a cup lying around or offer to wash it up, these are not details, but pieces of the puzzle that the recruiter will be trying to put together in order to make the best decision. The same goes for the way we dress, the way we carry ourselves, the way we say hello… Hidden tests are simply an extension of the interview by other means.

If these debates are so difficult to resolve, it’s because they raise a more thorny question: what exactly is being assessed during a recruitment process? A skill set, or a person? Skills can be explained and worked on, whereas a person must be observed in real-life situations. Deep down, it’s impossible to decide: work is fundamentally ambivalent, in that it is at once an instrumental relationship and an interpersonal one too. Instrumental, because a company always has a goal that it strives to achieve using the skills of its employees. In this sense, we’re all replaceable, because others can more or less do what we do – and this is a good thing, because otherwise we wouldn’t ever be able to take leave! Interpersonal, because a successful team always strikes a balance between different communication styles, values, working methods, and characters. In an interview, we’re therefore judged on our ability to carry out tasks and our ability to durably integrate a group.

But how can you assess a person’s commitment or work ethic in a few time-limited interviews? To try to get around this impasse, some use these hidden tests, but also personality tests, group challenges like escape games, and even astrology! The goal? Push the limit of what the candidate can control, to gather the kind of information they can’t filter through well-rehearsed speech. Except that no secret test will ever reveal the ultimate truth about a person, and no devious script or game can protect HR from making mistakes. To make sure interviews remain a real human encounter and not just an obstacle course for paranoid clones on the lookout for hidden tests, perhaps we should accept that residue of contingency which persists even in the most dehumanised process: intuition.

Apolline Guillot

Picture © possum1961 / iStockphoto