Uber is apparently using the plot of The Last Starfighter as its latest recruitment strategy. The company has built a hacking game called “Code on the Road” into its app, and is inviting people to participate while taking a ride. Players that score high enough are then asked if they would like to learn more about working for Uber and directed towards a recruitment page.
The game itself only asks generic coding questions, and doesn’t seem to require any particular skills to complete. It is believed that this is a general recruitment test for engineers who are looking for a change of jobs.
Uber itself is not opening the game to the whole world. Instead, its efforts are concentrated around US cities with a large number of tech workers like Seattle, Austin, Denver, and Portland. The company claims that it isn’t using information to target specific individuals and is pursuing a more general approach in its target areas.
This isn’t the first time that a company has tried to use games to recruit employees. Google is said to invite programmers to participate in a secret quiz if they perform searches for specific keywords. The Google invite doesn’t appear often, and it looks like the internet giant is leveraging its massive stores of user history to decide who gets to try a hand at their programming quiz.
[Source: Business Insider]
