Episode 106: How to pass graduate job games-based tests

October 2, 2020 Podcast

Hello and a warm welcome to episode 106 of the UK’s number 1 career podcast. It’s the beginning of the application process for graduate schemes, internships, vacation schemes and training contracts, and I have a beauty for you today. No matter who you apply to, for whatever type of scheme, you are going to have to do an online test, and increasingly, that test is going to take the form of a games-based assessment, and that is what we explore today, as I speak to Al Frater from Arctic Shores who are the leading provider of games based assessments, and who designed the PWC Career Unlocked games-based test. We will go into what games-based assessments are and why they are being used by graduate schemes. We will cover what you can expect in a games-based test and the types of games you can expect. We delve into how you can impress in them, and top tips for standing out from the crowd. We also explode some myths about games-based assessments cover why you shouldn’t believe everything that you read online. As always, it’s an episode which you aren’t going to want to miss. And today you can find a full transcript including all of the links in the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/games.

Before we start today let me tell you about my brilliant new step-by-step online course ‘How to Get a Graduate Job’ which I’m pleased to say is now LIVE!!!!! The first cohort of members have signed up and are in, and are loving the 8 modules, 23 video tutorials, and 20+ handouts and we have the first members-only webinar next week. The feedback has been brilliant, as one of the members said, ‘I just love having all of the information I need to get a graduate job in 1 place’. If you are serious about getting a graduate job, if you want to turbo-charge your job search, if you want to know all the pitfalls and mistakes so that you don’t make them yourself, and if you want to know exactly what you need to know to get on a graduate scheme, then head to howtogetagraduatejob.com and sign up. It is an investment in yourself which will pay itself back many thousand times over when you get that graduate job. So, go to www.howtogetagraduatejob.com and sign up now! Right, on with the show.

MORE SPECIFICALLY IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

  • What games-based assessments are
  • Why they are now being used by graduate schemes
  • What you can expect when you take a games-based test
  • Top tips for impressing in a games-based assessment
  • Whether gamers stand a better chance in the tests than non-gamers
  • Why you shouldn’t believe everything you read online about games-based tests
  • Why you don’t have to be perfect to pass a games-based test

SELECTED LINKS INCLUDE:

Transcript – Episode 106: How to pass graduate job games-based tests

Announcer: Welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast, your home for weekly information and inspiration to help you get the graduate job of your dreams.

James Curran: Hello and welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast, with your host James Curran. The Graduate Job Podcast is your home for all things related to helping you on your journey to finding that amazing job. Each episode I bring together the best minds in the industry, speaking to leading authors, graduate recruiters and career coaches who bring decades of experience into a byte size show. Put simply, this is the show I wish I had when I graduated.

Hello and a warm welcome to episode 106 of the UK’s number 1 career podcast. It’s the beginning of the application process for graduate schemes, internships, vacation schemes and training contracts, and I have a beauty for you today. No matter who you apply to, for whatever type of scheme, you are going to have to do an online test, and increasingly, that test is going to take the form of a games-based assessment, and that is what we explore today, as I speak to Al Frater from Arctic Shores who are the leading provider of games based assessments, and who designed the PWC Career Unlocked games-based test. We will go into what games-based assessments are and why they are being used by graduate schemes. We will cover what you can expect in a games-based test and the types of games you will face. We delve into how you can impress in them, and top tips for standing out from the crowd. We also explode some myths about games-based assessments and cover why you shouldn’t believe everything that you read about them online. As always, it’s an episode which you aren’t going to want to miss. And today you can find a full transcript including all of the links in the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/games.

Before we start today let me tell you about my brilliant new step-by-step online course ‘How to Get a Graduate Job’ which I’m pleased to say is now LIVE!!!!! The first cohort of members have signed up and are in, and are loving the 8 modules, 23 video tutorials, 14 hours of content, and 20+ handouts and we have the first members-only webinar next week. The feedback has been brilliant, as one of the members said, ‘I just love having all of the information I need to get a graduate job in 1 place’. If you are serious about getting a graduate job, if you want to turbo-charge your job search, if you want to know all the pitfalls and mistakes so that you don’t make them yourself, and if you want to know exactly what you need to do at each of the process to get on a graduate scheme, then head to howtogetagraduatejob.com and sign up. It is an investment in yourself which will pay itself back many thousand times over when you get that graduate job of your dreams. So, go to howtogetagraduatejob.com and sign up now! Right, on with the show.

James: I have a very special guest with me today. He and his company are the brains behind the games-based assessments that many of the large graduate recruiters are using in their online tests, and he is here today to give you the inside scoop on what you can expect and what you need to do. Alastair Frater from Arctic Shores, welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast.

Alastair Frater: Thank you very much for having me onto the podcast.

James: It’s great to have you on the show, and I gave listeners a very brief introduction there, but do you want to tell them a little more about yourself and what is it you do at Arctic Shores?

Alastair: Sure, yeah well maybe if I start with Arctic Shores. For those of you that maybe are not as familiar as some of your other listeners, Arctic Shores is a publisher of psychometric assessments that uses neuroscience and game technology to make the assessments that you do when you’re applying for graduate roles or any career roles, a bit different to the traditional questionnaire, survey-based assessments that you might have applied for other roles.

My role within the organization is I’m general manager for Europe. I’m a business psychologist by background, and I look after the commercial relationships that we have with our end users who are the organizations that your listeners will be applying to for placements and for jobs.

James: Excellent. Let’s start at the beginning then. What are games-based assessments?

Alastair: The story of Arctic Shores goes back six years where we were looking, or the founding team were looking to utilize game technology to disrupt the assessment space. We know that traditional assessments have some issues, and some challenges, and some problems around things like diversity, and being able to fake your profile, and that sort of thing. Game-based assessments do what they say on the tin, really. They are assessments that utilize game technology to deliver an assessment in a way that we don’t ask any questions.

I think that’s the key thing with our tool, and this is sometimes a bit strange when you first come across this is that we’re not asking you about you. What we’re asking you to do is interact with a series of tasks. They’re tasks and activities, I’d say, more than games, but they use game technology and mobile phone game technology to deliver those tasks, and you are then using that game-technology-based assessment to interact with it, and it has a way of unearthing and tapping into the innate behaviour and performance that the performance doing the assessment has and is portraying.

James: What’s wrong though with the traditional numerical test and the verbal test? What more do you get from a games-based assessment that you wouldn’t get from, say, those types of tests?

Alastair: Good question. I would split traditional tests into two halves. You’ve got your aptitude, which you’ve just mentioned, so your verbal reasoning, your numerical reasoning, abstract reasoning, that sort of thing. They are very much biased towards certain categories of candidates. Broadly speaking, male candidates do better with mathematics, female candidates do better with words, that’s really broadly speaking. I’m not saying that’s the case for every single person. Then, things like ethnicity, there’s a performance rating. You can Google it, and you’ll see that certain ethnicities do better at certain tests than others, and this has been widely replicated in academia and in the testing world in the last 30, 40 years. What we find with game-based assessment is that the way that we build the tool up, we don’t see any of those biases being played out with any of those protected groups.

The second type of assessment is where you’ve got your more personality in question base and preference and strengths, and that sort of thing based questionnaire. The problem we have with those is our biases come to the fore. Whenever you ask somebody something, they think, “Well, what answer do you want to know?” Especially in your recruitment setting, you think, “How do I want to portray myself, how does this company want me to portray myself?” I’m going to pick an example here off the top of my head. If I’m going for a sales role, I might answer differently if I’m going for a HR or a marketing role. I’m going to deliberately, or subconsciously, bend my answers depending on the scenario that I’m in.

That’s another benefit of the game-based assessment is there is no preconception of people trying to answer a question in a certain way that might be favourable for them. In fact, it’s impossible to do that because the things that we are measuring are inside the assessment, and they’re not necessarily obvious, the things that we’re measuring.

James: Yes, you make a really good point, and from some of the clients that I coach, I know that you can game the traditional personality tests, and you have an idea of what the company is looking for from candidates, and then it’s possible to lean into that side of your personality to maybe play it up a bit more in some tests than others. It’s interesting that you say that it’s less possible to do this with the games-based assessment.

Alastair: There’s definitely some socially-desirable things out there. If I say to you, James, “Have you got a good sense of humour or are you a good driver?” you’re very likely to tell me that, yes you have and yes you’re an excellent driver, whereas we know that everyone can’t be a great driver because there’s so many crashes on the roads, and also we know that humour is very subjective. I talked at an event recently where I showed a picture of Mrs. Brown’s Boys. For the UK listeners of your podcast, they probably know this. I personally think it’s a terrible program, but it’s won awards galore for being one of the funniest things on TV. That shows the subjectivity of this.

It’s the same with things like, “Are you driven, are you resilient?” If you ask your typical person applying for a job those questions, they’re going to say, “Of course I’m resilient and of course I’m really driven,” but how accurate is that assessment of somebody to say, “Yeah, this is where I am compared to the whole population.” It’s incredibly hard for somebody to answer that honestly whether they want to or not. That’s why we wanted to create something different, and that’s where we came up with the concept of using the neuroscience tasks in this format that uses the game technology.

James: I do think, though, a good question for any graduate recruiters would be, “Do you like Mrs. Brown’s Boys or not?” and if you answer yes, it could be straight away to the rejection pile. You can build into it for a later iteration.

Alastair: Don’t get me started on all the biases that would have crept into that process. I’m a huge believer that you shouldn’t have those insane questions that I hear popping up like, “How many leaves are there on all the trees in the country?” and you go and calculate them. These things are not very good either. Maybe if you like Mrs. Brown’s Boys, that can be an instant rejection.

James: Yeah, definitely. Can you give listeners some examples of the types of games that they might come across with some of the different graduate recruiters and how they would look?

Alastair: Absolutely. There are three or four companies that are publishing these game-based assessments now, and they fit into two camps, really. One is you’re more aptitude-based assessments, so you will have things that look and feel a little bit like your traditional tests. They will have an element of right and wrong answers, so there will be numerical reasoning, there will be abstract reasoning, there will be things like applying logic into space, and applying rules that you’re given within the games. We have both types, but there’ll be others where you are given a task and you are not told what that is doing, what that’s assessing, and you’re given a set of instructions, and my advice to your candidates, I’m sure we’re going to get onto this, is just to follow the instructions as best you can and interact with it how you naturally would.

Behind the scenes, those assessments are then looking at how you interact with each of those tasks. We deliberately give you — well, they should be clear, but perhaps they are slightly vague in terms of what they’re telling you to do, because that’s the whole point of it. An example of — one of the tasks that’s in two or three of the ones on the market is based on a neuroscience experiment called the “balloon analogue risk task“, and it’s you inflate balloons for a monetary reward. That tool, that assessment, that level is looking at about 15 to 20 different personality traits and behavioural preferences, and it really is about how you apply the tactics in the game.

I was trying to explain this to a relative recently about what I do, and they said a great example of this, and the one I explained to this person I was talking to is around rock, paper, scissors. Believe it or not, there is a psychological theory and there’s a psychological model behind the tactics deployed by people when they are interacting with rock, paper, scissors, and the same can be applied for any game that you might want to put out there. There is game theory and there is ways of applying it.

Once you know that and you know the things that people will do, typically, we then have a way of measuring it in the assessment. We can then look at the way that you’re interacting with it, and therefore your behavioural and your personality preferences. These are cross-validated across lots of levels. It’s not just a single level, but that’s basically how it works. You’ll be asked to do tasks like inflating balloons, you’ll be asked to steer people around buildings, you’ll be asked object recognition, you’ll be looking at face recognition at certain times. There’s a whole host of them. With our suite of tools, we have 13 different levels that you may or may not have to complete, depending on who it is that you’re applying to.

James: So, Al, are you able to say, then, which companies that you work with and where candidates might be coming across your tests?

Alastair: Absolutely, yeah. Our tool is used by about 150 clients in over 70 different territories, globally, and we work across markets. It’s not as if we’re in one area of the working world. Most of our clients are in Europe, and we have clients such as the government. If you’re applying for certain roles with the MOJ or the people like that, you may well do the assessment. We’ve got finance clients like Metrobank in the UK uses us, we’ve got PwC, we have manufacturers like KP Snacks uses us, then we have engineering businesses: Talas, Siemens. We have a broad church of clients that use us.

It’s not just in the early career space. I think that’s the focus of this podcast, but we do work with experienced hires. We do work on development projects as well. It’s a broad range of application. Ultimately, the reason we can do that is the way that we build up what companies are looking for is based off the amount of data that we capture within the tool. We measure lots and lots of personality and behavioural preferences, and then that can be applied whatever role that might be.

James: That’s a broad range of companies there, and many that I’m sure our listeners will be applying to. Maybe though if we just rewind a little bit to the balloon game that you mentioned. My understanding of this one is that you have a balloon and you’ve got to pump it up, and at some point the balloon pops. But, before the balloon pops, you get monetary value each time you pump it, and you have to make a decision about whether to bank the money before it pops or just keep on seeing if you can increase it and get more money. But then, if it pops, you don’t get any money. So, it’s a risk-reward type game, is that right?

Alastair: Yeah, absolutely. It’s fairly obviously about risk and reward, but it’s also measuring another 18 different things. I can’t divulge everything it’s measuring, I’m afraid. That kind of gives the game away, please excuse the pun. Yeah, it’s measuring a whole host of things within then, and those of your listeners that know anything about psychological theory, the things we’re measuring behind the scenes map onto something called the Big Five Personality Model, and that broadly encompasses things like openness to experience. Are you curious, are you interested in experiencing things? And that is measured in that level.

Conscientiousness is in there, so how diligent are you. That could be a link to things like how much money you’re banking. Extroversion is measured in that, believe it or not, and then things like agreeableness is measured in the two as well. That’s the fourth one of the Big Five, and the last one is neuroticism, which we don’t like calling it neuroticism. We call it emotional stability, so how emotionally stable are you when we put the pressure on in certain aspects within the tool is also looked at.

James: Okay, so listeners, you know where to, maybe, go and have a look if you’ve got come across Big Five before. It would be worth exploring that in more detail. Al, with different companies then, you mentioned the broad range of clients that you work with. Would they be looking at different aspects from each of the games?

Alastair: Exactly that. You might have two identical companies. I’m going to pick two that we don’t work with. Let’s say Tesco and Sainsbury’s, on the surface of it, they are identical. They are big supermarkets, they’re going to have a similar demand, similar things, similar expectations of their graduate roles, but they may want different things from the assessment. They may want subtly different behaviours that they are trying to as they evolve into slightly different businesses or they’ve just got different ethoses internally. It could be that you apply and you go through the assessment process, and depending on your score, you might pass for one of them, and you might not pass for the other because they will be looking for different combination, a different recipe of those behaviours that we measure. We measure 35 different things, and of those, the client they’re looking for, it might be high in one thing, medium in another, low in another, and you’re not going to know that as a candidate, and I would implore you not to read things on the internet.

We don’t divulge what a client is looking for. No one ever knows that. There are websites that try and sell you the magical formula to pass our tests. They are not right, and we do get them taken down, and we encourage people not to listen to those. The whole idea is that, yeah, the recipe, the formula for success for each of those companies is behind the scenes, but you, as a candidate, should just go through the process as naturally as you can and you’ll be benchmarked against that ideal formula.

James: Completely understand that. It makes perfect sense, unless you’re a candidate who wants to do their very best, and we talked earlier about how you can possibly game the system for different personality tests, and if you’re doing a traditional numerical test, you know what’s expected. You’ve got, maybe, 20-odd questions in not much time, and you’ve got to get as many right as you can. Same with verbal reasoning. You understand the format of what’s coming. For the clients I coach who’ve done games-based assessments, I think particularly ones who’ve not gone through it, what they’ve found difficult is not knowing where or why they’ve not got through the process. What advice would you give to people in this position?

Alastair: Yeah, sure. It’s difficult. I do understand why sometimes there is a little bit of frustration from candidates who want to be able to practice and get better at something. That is understandable, especially when you’re coming out of academia where you can practice, practice, and learn, and achieve. That is also the benefit of our tool. The idea is that we are helping you, as a candidate, to be matched to a role that is going to be good for you. Those combinations of ideal behaviours that the organization has identified really will mean that you’re going to do well and have a good fit, culturally and also behaviourally with that role.

There isn’t a kind of answer to changing your behaviour. What I would say is go through the process as naturally as you can. I know this is easy to say, but try not to worry about it, try not to stress about it. Just read the instructions and complete it as naturally as you can. That is the thing that they are looking for, and that is the thing that they really want from you. You should get a feedback report. I’m not sure about other games-based assessments, but all our clients provide feedback to candidates, and if you have further questions, then I would talk to the recruiters and say, “Can I have some feedback on that?”

My recommendation really is as simple as that, and it’s probably not what your listeners want to hear, but it really is just complete it as naturally as possible. This process really is designed to help companies identify the best fit for them, but also the other way around. We want to give you, the candidate, the opportunity to get into a role that really is the best fit for you. We do provide a resource online, so there is some practice material, there are some FAQs. I would encourage you to have a look at those, I would encourage you to read the instructions. That’s one of my slight bug bears is that candidates don’t necessarily read the instructions sometimes. Give yourself an opportunity. It might look and feel like a game. It’s not a game. It’s a proper assessment that you’re going to have to use to get yourself a job.

Make sure you are taking it seriously, do it in almost exam conditions. Make sure your phone’s on do not disturb or your computer. Do it somewhere quiet, make sure you’ve got enough battery, you’re on stable Wi-Fi, et cetera, et cetera. Set yourself up for success would be another thing I’d say, but in terms of the coaching, there isn’t much you can do, and that is part of the benefit of this, and that’s why what’s levelled the playing field as well is that it isn’t reliant on your ability to do maths or your ability to go into a better school. That is the beauty of this type of assessment.

James: In terms, then, of timing and things like that, you mentioned earlier the traditional numerical tests where you’re under strict time pressure, and often you’re not expected to be able to finish all of the questions. Is that the same with the games-based assessment? Should you expect to be able to finish everything or should you expect to be scrambling frantically at the end to complete it?

Alastair: It depends on the assessment and it depends on the level within the one that you’re doing. Some of our levels are open-ended, some of them have an end, some of them have a certain number of things you have to do, some can be finished, some can’t be finished. I would just, going back to my previous comment really, read the instructions and follow along. If your mate did it in 25 minutes, don’t worry if it takes you 30. It’s open-ended.

The thing with ours, there are a couple of levels like the aptitude ones that we still have that they are timed. The others are not timed at all. Yeah, do it to the best of your ability at a pace that is natural to you, and don’t do that awful thing I was always guilty of when I left exams of asking how did they do and what did they answer for certain questions. Just because somebody did it one way doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the right way.

James: Yeah, that’s never a good idea, so yeah, definitely a good point there. How about questions, say if you are running out of time, should you guess? Is there negative marking if you get things wrong, or is it best to have an educated guess?

Alastair: I can’t answer that because I don’t actually know the answer for our tool. Again, I just would reiterate, read the instructions. If it says that you will be negatively marked — my understanding is that, best practice, if you are going to be negatively marked, it will tell you. So, if it doesn’t tell you, then you can assume that you won’t be negatively marked, but that’s not a guarantee, and my feeling would be answer as many questions as you can at a pace you’re comfortable at.

James: That’s good advice. I was speaking to one of my clients that I’m coaching at the moment who’s applying for graduate jobs with the Big Four, and I mentioned that I was speaking to Arctic Shores, and a look of dread came across her face. I think she’d previously failed one of them, or some games-based assessments in the past, and she did have one question that she asked me to put to you, which was she felt that her brother, who was a gamer and had lots of computer gaming experience had an advantage over her because she hadn’t really ever played computer games before, and as a result, she felt that she was sort of disadvantaged when it came to some of the different games-based assessments. Do you think this is a fair point?

Alastair: It’s a really good question. Thank you for relaying it from your student that you coach. We do hear this, and people do suspect that it might be the case. We’ve done an awful lot of research to make sure it isn’t the case. The whole idea of this, and we use this for people, the demographic of your podcast in their early to mid-20s all the way through to people in their 60s. We don’t see any differences in age or in gaming ability.

What you’ll probably find is that those people that are hardcore gamers, it’s not a game. As I said at the start, our assessment is an assessment that uses a bit of game technology. If you’re ace at FIFA or you’ve played an awful lot of Grand Theft Auto, it’s not going to help you with this assessment at all. If you can operate a mobile phone, you should be able to use the assessment, and that’s why we provide the practice assessment on our website, and also you should have a practice when you’re invited via the company that you’re applying for to have a practice to get used to the ecosystem. Gaming ability makes no difference at all to the results, not one bit.

James: That’s good. That’s fairly unequivocal, so that’s good to hear for listeners. Our time is running away with us, so maybe just a couple more questions before we move to the quick-fire question round. Technological issues, what should people do if the internet goes midway through the test or something like that? What would you recommend?

Alastair: Yeah, sure. Please, please, please read the instructions at the start, so that will tell you to make sure you have enough battery, you’re in a place where you have got stable internet. In those cases where things happen, and of course they do happen — the other thing is put your phone on do not disturb so you don’t get a phone call from your partner or something halfway through. Things do crop up, okay? Now, if it does crop up, what you will find is you can go back in and start it again. Your progress is lost on that level that you’ve done so far. There’s no benefit from redoing it, so don’t think that there’s some kind of tactic of jumping out and going back in. You can restart it. It’s not a problem. If it’s an aptitude level, you will have to get the recruiter to reset it for you, and some recruiters have a policy of not resetting them.

So, just please read the instructions. Make sure you set yourself up to not have any of those technical hiccups. If it does happen, you should be able to log back in and the support team are there to help you. Don’t panic about it. It can be sorted, but yeah I would just, like anything, try and prepare to make sure you don’t have any in the first place.

James: Definitely, preparation prevents poor performance, so this is definitely one you don’t want to experience, so just make sure you put things in place that you don’t experience it.

Alastair: Yeah, absolutely, and if you find that your device doesn’t open it, that’s no issue. You can use somebody else’s, borrow one. Our assessment, again, I can only talk for our one, but our assessment works on computers, Macs and PCs, but also on tablets and most new mobile phones as well, so you should be able to operate it on any sort of device that’s connected to the internet, but there are obviously some that it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t have to be your main device. If you are struggling, then perhaps borrow somebody else’s.

James: Excellent, and final question then before the quick-fire round, what advice would you give graduates who are just setting off now on the application process and are going to be coming across games-based assessments? What can they do?

Alastair: I’ll only answer this specific thing about game-based assessments rather than broadly. That’s too much, probably, for the scope of this one call. I would say try and just relax into it, follow the instructions, take your time. Whilst it is an assessment that is gamified to make it, hopefully, less intimidating and more accessible, it is not a game. It is a proper assessment, and take it seriously, take it properly. That is my biggest number 1 advice to somebody. It is not designed to trip you up, it is not designed to interrogate you. It really is about finding the best matched careers for the people that are going through it, and that really is our honest, heartfelt mission within Arctic Shores is to get the right people in the right roles so they have a great career.

Just go into it, put your best foot forward, and do everything you can. As I’ve said throughout this, prepare well and give it your best. But, it’s not a competition. That’s the thing. It is a way of you interacting with it, and we’re all looking for your natural preferences. Again, just try not to overthink what you’re doing.

James: Excellent, and then maybe one cheeky final question. Do you know what the average pass rate is for the different tests?

Alastair: It would really depend on the program, how many people are going through it. Often, it’s not like a pass and fail. On aptitude tests, you do have a pass and fail. You either know the maths question or the verbal reasoning question or not, then it’s quite easy to have a pass or fail. On the more behavioural stuff, it’s not really about passing and failing. It’s about how good a fit you are, and so, of all of those traits that I’ve mentioned previously on this podcast, we’re not saying you have to have a certain level, but what we’re saying is if you have, let’s say, 10 different traits that are really key to the role that you’re recruiting for, you want to see that the candidates coming through are your ideal profile for most of those.

We’re not all perfect, we’re not all the same, we’re not clones of each other, so you can’t be ideal and absolutely everything perfect perfect, but what we’re looking for is a good fit to most of those. It isn’t about having a single pass mark, and this is where it gets a bit more complicated behind the scenes with the scoring, but there is a threshold, of course, but I wouldn’t be fixated as a, “I’ve got to do this to get past it.”

James: That makes sense, so listeners, plenty there for you to get your teeth into. Al, let’s move onto the weekly quick-fire questions. Interested in your responses here. Firstly, what one book would you recommend that listeners read? It doesn’t have to be careers or testing-related.

Alastair: I’m trying to think of ones that I’ve read recently that I would recommend. I finally got around to reading Freakonomics. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. It’s quite an old book now, but it’s a fascinating book at the psychology behind economics. I would recommend that. I read that a couple months ago. That was a very cool book.

James: There are quite a few sequels falling off on that, but yeah, it really is fascinating to see why most drug dealers live with their moms, and other facts like that.

Alastair: Yeah, that’s cool.

James: Next question. What website or internet resource would you recommend that listeners use?

Alastair: I am a huge fan of the Bloomberg website for news, current affairs, and a whole host of other things, so I would recommend that.

James: Excellent, and I will link that in the show notes, which you can find today at graduatejobpodcast.com/games. Final question then today, what one tip would you give listeners that they can implement today to help them on their job search?

Alastair: Okay, be authentic. That would be my number 1 tip: be authentic. I’m longer in the tooth now than most of the listeners that will be listening to this, and I think if I had my time again in my career search in my early career, I would be true to what genuinely makes me tick, and that goes for career choice, and it goes for aspirations that I had and perhaps roles that I went after. Be authentic to generally what interests you, and that should stand you in good stead of getting a role that you’ll thrive in.

James: That neatly ties in with the conversation that you had earlier, and even though everybody wants to pass every test, if you don’t pass a games-based assessment, there’s probably a reason why, and you don’t want to be working in a job that isn’t going to be well-suited to you and your skills. It’s not going to set you up for long-term happiness and long-term success.

Alastair: Absolutely. It’s a two-way street, and I know, often in graduate recruitment processes that it feels like it’s rejection, rejection because it’s competitive and there’s lots of volume, but it really should be a two-way street. They should be trying to convince you to come and work for them once you’ve established that it’s a good fit for each other. So, bear that in mind, remember that.

James: Definitely. That’s a nice place for us to finish the interview on. Al, thank you so much for your time today. What’s the best way, though, that people can get in touch with you and the work that Arctic Shores does?

Alastair: Via our website, so arcticshores.com, and there is a whole section on there for candidates to have a look at and get some resources, and I think on our new website, there’s a link to me and a terrible picture of me, but yeah you can find me via that. If not, I’m on LinkedIn.

James: Al, thank you so much for appearing on the Graduate Job Podcast.

Alastair: Pleasure.

James: There you go, an interesting episode today for you. Many thanks again to the brilliant Al Frater from Arctic Shores for his time and insight. So… where does that leave you with games-based assessments? I was pushing Al for the silver bullet to completing them, the one thing you need to do, and it seems that unfortunately, there isn’t one. I was surprised when he said there were 20 different things that they were measuring in the balloon game. It’s not just risk and reward, but 18 other things… so how do you game that? And the answer is, you can’t. Now that is a good thing, and a bad thing, it’s a bad thing, because you can’t game it, by the nature of the fact you are taking the time to listen to this podcast and also listen to my sultry voice to the end tells me you are a serious candidate, and as such, you are the type of person who wants to do well, who wants to practice and make a difference. And with games based assessments that is difficult, because as we have heard they are measuring 20 different characteristics and you don’t know what those characteristics are, so how do you game them… the answer is that you don’t. Which conversely is a good thing, because it means then that you just need to go in there and do your best. As my grandma used to tell me, you can only do your best, and for some companies that best will be good enough, and annoyingly, really annoyingly, for others, it won’t. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare, practice the practice tests from Arctic Shores which I have linked to in the show notes at graduatejobpodcast.com/games, practice the ones that Assessment Day and Job Test Prep have, as Al said, take it seriously, read the questions really carefully, concentrate, make sure your tech works, and…importantly, be as natural as you can. Don’t second guess what they want, as you don’t know, so be naturally and authentically you, and that way, you can’t go wrong.

So, there you go games-based assessments done. All that remains is to say if you want to dive into this topic deeper, and the topic of getting a graduate job more specifically, then get yourself to www.howtogetagraduatejob.com where I have 23 video tutorials encompassing 14 hours on every aspect of getting a graduate job. Module 4 is dedicated solely to the topic of online tests and we spend 70 minutes going through every aspect of it, including games-based assessments. If you are serious about getting a graduate job, then this is the course for you. Stand out from the crowd and check it out. At howtogetagraduatejob.com.

So, I hope you enjoyed the show today, drop me a note and say hello or book yourself a completely free 30-minute coaching session go to the show notes where you can find the details. Join me next week where I have author Anne Baum on the show discussing the different personality types you need to be aware of in a job interview. I hope you enjoyed the episode today, but more importantly; I hope you use it and apply it. See you next week.