Recently I had to hire some IT staff for work, and since it’s difficult to gauge someone’s technical skills from an interview alone, I decided to create a short “quiz” or “exam” for the candidates to complete before their interview.

I intentionally made the level of the questions difficult for the sort of candidates I was expecting. As anticipated, no one got all of the questions correct. The better candidates managed to get around half correct and this was about the level that we wanted — too low and they were no good, too high and they probably didn’t really want this job anyway.

The reason for all of this blabbering is for me to link to the quiz for anyone interested to try. Print it out or whatever and see how you go.

Mike’s IT Quiz Exam Thing

What Video Game Character Am I? Well, read below:

I am a Breakout Bat.

I am an abstract sort of creature, who dislikes any sort of restraint. If you try to pigeonhole me, I’ll break the box, and come back for more. I don’t have any particular ambitions, I just drift, but I am adept at keeping life going along.

(If you were not a Breakout Bat you would be a Pacman Ghost)

Last night, Justine and I (along with one of Justine’s friends, Hannah) attended a trivia/fundraising event for Justine’s nephew’s kindergarten. It was the first time either of us had attended a trivia night, and this one seems to have been rather large (though we have nothing to compare it to).

There were twenty-one tables of 10-16 people (so two to three-hundred people) spread throughout the illustrious Hungarian Community Centre in Boronia; most of the people there seemed to have a lot of disposable income (or as I liked to say, “more dollars than sense”, ha… yeah it’s bad). There was a silent auction of various random crap — I participated in bidding for an LG 64MB memory stick, but once it hit $20 I was out — as well as a “regular” auction. A signed Collingwood team jumper went for around $400, a Brazilian wax went for $70 and a signed Essendon footy went for over $200. See? More dollars than sense.

The trivia side of things was run by Mr. QuizKing himself (well, it looks like the same guy), and if you ask me, most of the questions were definitely not geared towards people of my age or younger. It seems like the minimum age of entry was 35-40 for the entire event; I suppose I was just lucky that I have a lot of random knowledge crap stored in my head.

Not that it mattered, since the other people on my table wouldn’t listen to my correct answers. In the “name that movie” round, I got 18/20 (one was such bad quality I couldn’t even tell what I was watching, the other I’d never seen) and managed to get a few people to listen to me. However, in the “general knowledge/sports” round, there were 3-4 answers that people were sure they were right, and I knew I was right. Well, they just wouldn’t listen and we didn’t win because of it.

Still, I think the guy probably needs to go and get a bit more variety in his questions. It just seemed to me that the whole thing was aimed — like I was saying before — at people aged 35-55. That’s a pretty big spread, true, but what about people younger and people older than that?

Then again, who in their right mind would go to a trivia night when they’re under 30? Oh, wait… Erm. Nevermind. Anyway, it was an OK way to pass the time, but as it is I’m certainly not in a major hurry to go back to one of these nights; I just don’t see what all the fuss is about.