A senior cloud infrastructure engineer with fifteen years of experience applied for a role that matched his background precisely. The company’s response was not a technical screen. It was a link to a mobile game.
The assessment, described as a “mandatory behavioural evaluation,” required tapping emoji faces, clicking floating balloons, and memorising sequences of flashing lights. It ran for forty-five minutes. There was no infrastructure question. No architecture discussion. No human.
When the result came back, the candidate was rejected. The stated reason: “cognitive intelligence below threshold.”
The engineer posted the experience to r/recruitinghell, where it drew thousands of reactions. Commenters pointed out the obvious: a forty-five-minute balloon-tapping game tells you nothing about someone’s ability to manage cloud infrastructure. What it does tell you is that the company outsourced candidate screening to a gamified IQ test and called it innovation.
“Fifteen years in the field and a balloon game decided I wasn’t smart enough,” the engineer wrote. He has since made a personal rule: any company that sends a game instead of a conversation gets a withdrawal, not a score.