“What is your biggest weakness?” The first time I encountered this classic interview question I was about 20 and I had no idea how to handle it. “I’m really bad at turning up on time for things,” I replied, which had the virtue of being true. The interviewer, frowning, drew a careful X on his clipboard.

“你最大的缺点是什么？”第一次遇到这个经典面试问题时，我20岁左右，完全不知道怎么应付。“说实话，我并不擅长准时出席各种场合，”秉承着诚实的美德，我这样作答。面试官皱着眉头，在他的本子上仔细地打了个叉。

The lesson I learnt is that persuading someone to hire you is like playing a game: there are rules and you need to find out what they are.

我从中学到的教训是，说服别人雇佣你就像玩游戏：这其中是有规则的，你需要找出规则是什么。

Some employers are now taking this idea to extremes by designing games for job candidates to play.

现在，有些雇主把这个理念发扬到了极致——设计游戏，让应聘者玩。

L’Oréal, Ernst & Young, Microsoft and Deutsche Bank have signed up to a smartphone app called Debut that promises to let young people “fast-track the recruitment process and land roles in blue-chip companies simply by playing mobile games”.

欧莱雅(L’Oréal)、安永(Ernst & Young)、微软(Microsoft)和德意志银行(Deutsche Bank)都和一款叫做“Debut”的智能手机应用签署了合作合约。这款应用承诺让年轻人“只需通过玩手机游戏就能快速走完招聘流程，赢得蓝筹公司的职位”。

At first glance, it is hard to see why these employers thought this was a good idea. L’Oréal’s game involves running around a maze, jumping over walls and collecting things. Deutsche Bank’s requires you to roll a ball around the corporate logo without letting it fall off the edge. Do bankers need good balance? Do product designers need good reflexes?

初看之下，很难看出这些雇主为何会认为这是个好主意。欧莱雅的游戏是在迷宫中奔跑，翻墙越壁，收集物品。德意志银行的游戏要求玩家操控小球滚过该公司的logo，不能让球从边缘掉落下来。银行家们需要良好的平衡感吗？产品设计人员需要良好的反射神经吗?

Even if these games were testing for the right attributes, the obvious problem is that they can be gamed. It does not take a genius to set up several user accounts with different email addresses, practise the games endlessly, then log on with their real name once they have perfected them.

就算这些游戏测试的是正确的特质，一个明显的问题是人们可以耍花招。一个人无需聪明绝顶，也能想到用不同的邮件地址设置几个账号不断练习，达到完美以后再登录用自己真名注册的账户。

It would be like having the chance to answer that “biggest weakness” question over and over again until you found a response that did not elicit a frown.

这就像是有机会一遍一遍地回答“个人最大缺点”的问题，直到你找到一个不会让对方皱眉的回答。

Thankfully, these companies are not foolish enough to have overlooked this. Notwithstanding the app’s hype, these mobile games are really a marketing tool rather than an alternative selection process. They are a way for employers to engage with potential job applicants who they might not otherwise reach.

幸亏这些公司还没有蠢到忽略这一点。和这款应用的宣传措辞不同，这些手机游戏实际上更多是一种营销手段，而非可替代的选拔流程。这种游戏是雇主接触它们在其他情况下可能接触不到的潜在应聘者的途径。

“It’s not as if we’re struggling for applications, but it’s about getting the right applicants,” says Dan Richards, EY’s head of UK recruitment. He does not want to keep fishing for recruits in the small and homogenous pool of university students who go along to recruitment fairs.

“并不是说我们在力争收到申请，而是要获得合适的申请者，”安永英国招聘主管丹•理查兹(Dan Richards)表示。他不想一直在赴招聘会求职的大学生这种同质化、规模又不大的人才池中寻找新员工。

In that sense, these mobile games are indicative of an important shift taking place in recruitment.

在这个意义上，这些手机游戏折射出了招聘领域所发生的重大转变。

Big employers are beginning to realise they have to change the way they do things if they want more diverse workforces.

大雇主开始意识到，如果它们想要打造更加多样化的员工队伍，就必须改变行事方式。

Deloitte, for example, has changed its application process so recruiters do not know where the candidates went to school or university. It is running a video game trial of its own.

比如，德勤(Deloitte)改革了申请流程，招聘人员不知道应聘者的教育背景。德勤有自己的视频游戏测试。

Many of the biggest law firms, meanwhile, have signed up to use a “contextual recruitment product” that identifies people who might not meet standard academic requirements but have outperformed relative to their backgrounds.

同时，许多大型的律师事务所已经签约使用一种“情境招聘产品”，这种产品能够辨识出或许没有达到标准的学术背景要求、但相对于他们的背景表现出色的人。

For its part, EY has scrapped all academic qualifications from its entry criteria and replaced them with a set of standardised online tests. Its research shows that a good score on these tests is a better predictor of professional success than academic performance. In the first few months of the new system, one in 10 applicants who made it to the interview stage would have been ineligible to apply previously.

至于安永已经取消了申请标准中的所有学历要求，取而代之的是一组标准化在线测试。安永的研究表明，比起应聘者在校的学习成绩，在这些测试中拿到高分更能预测应聘者在职业上的成功。新系统启用后的头几个月里，在成功抵达面试环节的应聘者中，每10个人中有1个人在以前根本没有资格申请。

“Name-blind” recruitment is also gaining ground to try to combat racial bias. Academic studies in the US and UK have shown that identical job applications make more progress when they have “white-sounding” names on them. Experiments in France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands suggest that anonymous job applications do increase the probability that applicants from ethnic minorities are invited for interview.

作为一种应对种族偏见的手段，“不记名”招聘也在逐渐流行开来。美国和英国的学术研究表明，提交内容相同的简历，署有“听起来像白人”的名字的简历能够走得更远。法国、德国、瑞典和荷兰的实验表明，匿名工作申请的确能够提高少数族裔申请者受邀参加面试的几率。

The evidence is too patchy to tell whether their chances of a job offer recede again at the interview stage.

要判断这些人在面试阶段过后被录用的几率是否会再次回落，证据还不充足。

Interviews, of course, are the final frontier in this battle to diversify recruitment. This is the stage where racial discrimination can creep back in. It is also where those candidates with polish and practice can still outgun the rest.

当然，面试是招聘多样化员工这场战役中的最后一道战线。这是种族歧视可能会再次悄然回归的阶段，也是那些有风度、有经验的应聘者依然能够脱颖而出的阶段。

Employers will have to tackle this challenge next. “Gamification” is easy to dismiss as a passing fad involving online play. Yet in its broadest sense, it is something well worth fighting for: an attempt to make recruitment the sort of game where the playing field is level and everyone knows the rules.

下一步，雇主必须解决这个挑战。“游戏化”很容易会视作不过是跟在线游戏有关的一时风尚。然而，从最宽泛的意义上来讲，这是一种非常值得我们努力争取的东西：它力求让招聘成为公平竞争、每个人都知道规则的游戏。