In August my one-by-one year contract for up to five years will come to an end. It means Sony Mobile has to decide if they want to keep me for good or throw me out. Currently it seems they want to keep me so my manager and HR has initiated a hiring procedure.

First activity in the hiring procedure was done today, a written test under time pressure. First part was a logic thinking and math test that had to be done in 60 minutes. Questions like “in a bowl there are 5% apples, 35% bananas. The remaining fruits in the bowl are oranges and kiwis. There are 2 oranges for every 1 kiwi. There are 3 apples in the bowl. How many percent oranges are there in the bowl?”

The second part of the test was behaviour and characteristics test. About 200 statements that you should indicate how well they describe you, like “when I face a problem I take action directly without thinking.”

You can wonder why it is necessary when I already did the same type of test when I got hired 4.5 years ago. Also, it seems a poor substitute for evaluating what value I have added to the company over the past years – “it looks like you have done a good job but it cannot be true because you scored so low on the written test.” I actually had a crazy idea to test this by just answering everything the wrong way 😈