Coffee cup test for interviews, those that fail won’t get hired

Former CEO, Trent Innes says that he uses the coffee cup test to hire employees and it’s fail safe. He says it is the best way to vet people rather than just wading through a thick pile of resumes and trying to determine who makes the grade.

He says that anyone who fails his coffee cup test would automatically be blacklisted. Trent has worked at Xero Australia but left in September 2021 and share his little trick for hiring people on the business podcast show, The Venture.

“I will always take you for a walk down to one of our kitchens and somehow you always end up walking away with a drink. Then we take that back, have our interview, and one of the things I’m always looking for at the end of the interview is, does the person doing the interview want to take that empty cup back to the kitchen? You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge and experience but it really does come down to attitude, and the attitude that we talk a lot about is the concept of ‘wash your coffee cup’.

He says this system of his, works every single time. Anyone who comes to his office will see that the kitchen is absolutely clean and shiny and in order to fit into the future he’s going to want to see how strong the urge is for the candidate to clean or wash his own cup after having his coffee.

On the topic of job interviews, in another incident, a candidate was rejected purely on the basis of his interaction with the receptionist at the front desk of the office he had gone to for an interview.

The candidate’s chances went belly up in the first five minutes when he was dismissive to the receptionist and refused to make eye contact with her.