Steve Jobs had a ‘beer test’ when hiring potential Apple employees

Where do you see yourself in five years? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Everyone’s familiar with these kinds of banal interview questions, but it turns out Steve Jobs had a very different approach when it came to evaluating potential employees.

The former co-founder and CEO of Apple, who died in 2011, was known for doing things slightly differently when it came to running one of the biggest companies of all time.

One of his unusual practices involved taking prospective employees out of the office during interviews and walking with them to a local bar.

As as.com reports, Jobs was known for mixing things up in order to get past the interviewees’ pre-planned list of answers in order to get to know them personally.

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For Jobs, the idea of knowing people's true nature was key. He managed this by speaking “in a relaxed way while taking a walk” before having a drink with them.

iStock/Getty

While sharing a beer together, Jobs would keep things informal and ask them questions such as “When was the last time you accomplished something?” or “What did you do last summer?”.

This was Jobs’ way of finding employees who not only had the right skills for the job, but would be best to work with.

He was after the “A-Players” in the field, and he previously said: “I found that when you get enough A-players together, when you go through the incredible job of finding these A-players, they really like working with each other.

“Because they’ve never had the chance to do it before.”

There are plenty of people who would have paid a lot of money to go for a beer with Steve Jobs and it turns out you could have done – all you had to do was apply for a job at Apply and be one of the brightest “A-Players” of your generation.

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