No matter how confident you are about a job interview, it’s always stressful. Even if you’re confident in your abilities, it’s all about the first impression.
Will you and your potential boss hit it off or will you bomb before you’ve even begun? What if there was a way to mitigate that stress?
Well, for Rajiv Jayaraman and Vijay Kalangi, that’s part of what the dream is all about. As the co-founders of Knolskape, they want to improve how business across the world conduct interviews when hiring new blood, as well as how they evaluate employees up for a promotion. The thing is, they don’t just want to make interviews smoother. They want to make them an exact science.
I sat down with Vijay Kalangi, who also serves as the CTO of Knolskape, so he could brief me about the company’s custom-built tool, Kognitix. Think of it like their paring knife, with which he and Jayaraman want to strip away all the unnecessary bluster in the hiring process, so companies and employees alike can focus on what’s really important: getting shit done.
What’s all the fuss about?
To spell it out a little clearer, Kognitix is a an assessment tool, albeit likely not similar to one you’ve seen before. Rather than resembling any school or college exam you’ve taken, it’s more akin to your first day with a trainer at the gym. The former would have you simply writing down what you know, while the latter would need you to show what you know. And that there is the crux of the difference.
Reuters
“We could put potential hires through Q&A sessions,” says Kalangi, “But we asked ourselves how we could make learning and testing fun.” It was for this purpose that Kognitix was built, right here in India. Developed in-house from scratch, it’s an interactive set of tests designed as browser games. A participant simply plays the games, each about 5 to 7 minutes long, and the program measures their responses to spit out a final score at the end.
Kalangi tells me the company has been working on the tool for a year, and has conducted tests with a number of analytical target groups. And though grounded squarely in psychology, they’ve found the corporate applications to be undeniable. “It’s less to do with instruction and more with experience,” he says. “The process is entertaining so it takes away the person’s anxiety. Sometimes they even discover new things about themselves.”
Kognitix’s Space Raid module
“Interviews are typically anxiety inducing, because people are aware that they are being judged,” says Gangireddy Danamreddy, Site Reliability Engineer at Knolskape. “There is usually the pressure of giving the ideal response for an ideal result.” Danamreddy was also hired to the company using Kognitix, as part of lengthy beta testing phase. “I did not have such a cool & unique experience in an interview process ever,” he says.
“Typically, we like to think that our cognitive abilities are superior. In reality, they may not be exactly what we expect them to be. It was an insightful revelation of my strengths & weaknesses for me,” he adds.
Behind the scenes
Kognitix’s Space Raid module
As Kalangi says, the games for Kognitix have each been specially chosen and designed based on inputs from the company’s organizational psychologists and global consultants. It might also be the only one of its kind existent in India. Each game module is tiny, just about 5MB, and can be played in the browser on your smartphone or laptop. With each game between 5 to 7 minutes long, you’ve finished a stringent testing session in about 45 minutes, or just under an hour if you watched the tutorials more than once.
It’s also not possible to fake your answers on the test, Kalangi assures me. Though you can watch the tutorials multiple times, you can only play each game once. Mole Combat assesses your working memory, Party Rush gauges how much of a risk-taker you are, Space Raid measures how much you pay attention and your response time, Zombie Flush tests your problem solving and decision making capabilities as well as your response inhibition, Candy Crunch looks at your flexibility of thought, and Park Smart gauges your effectiveness at planning ahead.
Kognitix
Each of these then give you an individual score, which is represented on a five-point scale, based on where you stand in relation to the norm for your group. For instance, scoring a 1 on response inhibition means you tend to come across as impulsive rather than measured in your approach. Scoring a 3 on planning puts you in the average range, which means you come up with realistic plans for assignments, but you tend to struggling with planning for contingencies.
More than just numbers to judge you
A report from playing these games doesn’t just give you a score either, but instead details what each score means. It elaborates on what you’re good at in each category of the test, what you need to be mindful of, and recommends how you should tackle your shortcomings and use your strengths. And mind you, all of this is what you get even if you’re applying for a job, as opposed to looking to move up in the company.
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Knolskape also has other plans to change how corporates work. For one, they’re developing simulations that put employees into particular situations they have to deal with. With this, since their performance capabilities are already known, they can test how an employee’s personality gels with others, and thus take a decision on a promotion. They’re also internally testing a Mood meter that employees interact with a certain number of times a week. Based on responses, they can gauge what a worker’s happiness level is within the company, to help keep up morale.
Kalangi isn’t talking about eliminating interviews entirely though, just refining the process. A face to face is still essential, he says, but it can work so much better when conducted with added inputs from a cognitive measurement system. “It can act as a great first filter in the hiring,” he says.