Does A Childhood Spent Playing Arcade Games Help Evaluate Talent?

Being able to recognize patterns in career behavior takes time and repetition

I grew up playing video games, often tagging along with my older brother and his friends to the local arcade. I played all the classics: Pac Man, Centipede, Donkey Kong, not so much the driving games. My favorite is Robotron, one of the few video games to be played with two joysticks (instead of a button for firing it has a joystick – so one joystick to move and another one to fire). My college buddies bought me an original Robotron from an arcade at the jersey shore as a wedding gift! Unfortunately, it had all original parts (circa 1977) and it kept breaking down so after 17 years in my basement I had to get rid of it. I digress…

While I don’t have any “scientific evidence” to prove this theory, it is my contention that growing up playing arcade games makes me a better recruiter. Let me explain.

The objective of most arcade games back in the day, including Robotron, was simple - progress from one level to the next, until you ran out of lives and the screen read GAME OVER or you “flipped the game” which meant the game basically restarted to level one. Unfortunately, I never became THAT good at any game to do flip it, though my high score in Robotron was 1.2m. However, later in life I watched my son’s 13u baseball coach flip Galaga at a pizza place in Omaha, Nebraska. To this day one of the most impressive things I’ve witnessed in my life, but I digress (again)…

To become great at old school arcade games you needed to be able to recognize and recall patterns. To gain that knowledge, you needed experience…spend a lot of quarters, play a lot of games, and remember the movements. The popular 10,000 hours theory (which there is evidence to support – the first chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers covers this…great read).

Take Pac Man. Those ghosts that move around trying to run into Pac Man and kill him aren’t just randomly moving around, though it appears that way. They are pre-programmed to move in certain directions at certain times based on certain movements the player makes with the Pac Man. Once a player figures this out, it becomes much easier to advance to the next level.

Experienced recruiters have interviewed hundreds of candidates, reviewed hundreds of resumes, and managed hundreds of interview processes and offer negotiations, like spending quarters in an arcade. Just as memorizing ghost patterns helps in Pac Man, being able to memorize “career patterns” helps in screening candidates and deciding which candidates should be presented to hiring managers; which candidates are genuinely interested in the opportunity; who will be the right candidate to hire.

Recruiters continue to learn and refine their opinions on candidates with each interaction: answers to questions, timeliness and content of email or text responses, flexibility in accommodating for interviews, etc. All these candidate datapoints, including if the candidate gets the offer and takes the job, are logged by an astute recruiter – in a CRM and in their memory. And subsequently recalled when working on future searches.

Having a trusted, seasoned recruiter who can connect the career dots while sourcing candidates and managing an interview process will make for an efficient, successful hire. Whether or not that recruiter can get to the second stage break on Pac Man on their first life may not seem relevant, but then again can you do that?