Pizza Hut is planning to hire a new manager of digital media, and it’s launching the search at SXSW with 140-second interview sessions with interested candidates. The restaurant chain says the exercise reflects the real-life demands of a marketing position in an environment fueled by digital media. The quickie in-person interviews are meant to put candidates on the spot and see if they can be brief yet on-point, memorable, even creative, just like communicating through social media. The 140-second limit is an obvious homage to Twitter’s character limit.
Yum! Brands-owned Pizza Hut is not alone in taking a creative approach to job interviews with questions meant to test qualities that go beyond just qualifications. Google is probably best known for it, mixing practical interview questions with probing designed to throw candidates off their game. Potential product managers there better polish up on conundrums such as how much they’d charge to wash all of the windows in Seattle or how they’d evacuate San Francisco in a disaster, while a software engineer should know why manholes are round.
Hewlett Packard seems to want to separate the wheat (the logic-driven) from the chaff (everyone else) with this one: “If Germans were the tallest people in the world, how would you prove it?” Online shoe store Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh likes to ask, “On a scale of one to ten, how weird are you?” It probably works as one of those lines that’s ice breaker to some, iceberg in the water to others.
The overriding goal with these types of questions is largely to see whether people can go beyond rambling off what they’re good at, showing if they can tackle unforeseen problems, gin up new ideas, and perhaps innovate on the fly. All are important qualities in today’s corporate world.
For Pizza Hut’s part, chief people officer Tracy Skeans said the ‘tweet on your feet’ first interview is to see “how the candidates hold up.”
After SXSW, Pizza Hut is giving other candidates the opportunity to participate in 140-second interviews for the same position over Skype. It has also launched the Twitter hashtag #becauseimgreat and put out a video spelling out the process for anyone interested.
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