Applying for a job with Steven Bartlett – very odd and very revealing

You are all, I like to imagine, hard workers, Stakhanovite in your dedication to your professions and willing to go the extra mile in pursuit of excellence – or at least that’s what you tell LinkedIn.

However dedicated you are to your job, though, you might not be dedicated enough to appease a man rapidly emerging as the most exacting employer in all of Britain – step forward entrepreneur, Dragon, founder of the Diary of a CEO podcast and Huel devotee Steven Bartlett.

Bartlett is a man so famously enamoured of the hustle and so dedicated to the grind that even a glass or two of red wine is considered a dangerous, debilitating distraction from the vital business of becoming violently rich. He is also known for eschewing the more traditional CV-led hiring process in favour of a system of his own devising.

Rather than focusing on a potential recruit’s past experience, the Bartlett businesses, under his umbrella company Flight Story, run all hires through a “Culture Test” that scores how they would handle workplace scenarios.

What, exactly, does a man who has previously said that staff should be “disciples” of the company (and, er, who’s lost four key senior staff members in the past five months – amicably, we are assured) think makes for “good” workplace culture? Thankfully The New World managed to get its hands on the test in question. So read on if you want to learn if you have what it takes to make it in the Bartlett Employment Hunger Games!

We start gently, with what seems like a softball question, “When faced with a project at work, which picture best represents your natural approach?”. The choice of images used to illustrate each of the multiple choice responses, though, already seems telling. “Discussion” is accompanied by an image of some earnest-looking student types; “Urgent” and “Strategic” by photos of GOAT-level performers Usain Bolt and Magnus Carlsen. Are you trying to tell us something, Steven?

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Come question seven and eight, the gloves are off. Applicants are confronted with the statement “having a healthy ‘work-life balance’ is important to me”, and asked to grade it on a five-point scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.”

The follow-up question invites them to “please explain your answer for the previous question”, offering a free-text field for candidates to explain why they might sometimes prefer not to be working until their eyes bleed for the further enrichment of one S. Bartlett.

You are invited to agree – or, for the brave, to disagree – with assertions including “I often find myself getting annoyed that colleagues of mine don’t work as hard as me,” and “I set goals that others I work with may view as too ambitious or unrealistic.” You’re asked whether “it is important to me to work with people who share my social and political values”. While it’s unclear how “being a horrible bastard to work with” ranks on the list of desirable qualities for Steven, I have one or two ideas as to how these might be graded.

The real gold, though, comes from the practical scenarios presented to candidates as “real life” examples of the sort of high-pressure scenarios a Bartlett, er, “disciple” might be forced to confront.

“You wake up at 9am to 20 emails from your most important clients,” reads one. “Overnight, someone hacked your email account and sent highly specific, abusive messages – pretending to be you – targeting your clients’ physical appearances. Your clients are furious, withdrawing their business, and responding with hostile messages. How intensely would you feel your emotions in that moment?”

Not for the last time, one gets the impression that these vignettes might well have been drawn from the bizarre reality of working in the Stevenverse.

Someone at Flight Story – who can say who? – has a real problem with Christmas. There are two separate scenarios in which interviewees are asked what they would do if confronted with an “urgent” business issue just before Christmas (one landing on Christmas Eve).

In both cases, one of the answers involves the applicant agreeing to work over Christmas to solve the problem. Another even affords the candidate the opportunity to share the suffering – “rally the team for a final push and remind them that the year is not done.” Flight Story, for the avoidance of doubt, is a business engaged in digital marketing and podcast production.

Holidays, generally, seem to be treated as an inconvenience. “A client messages you on WhatsApp on Saturday evening while you’re out with friends at a restaurant. They need the login details for their social media account, but your colleague, who has the details, is on holiday. How do you respond?” If you can’t tell that the correct answer is “(A) WhatsApp your colleague who is on holiday straight away and ask them for the login details” then, well, I’m sorry but maybe you’re not cut out for this business.

An illustration of the calibre of the whole operation can be seen in another practical example. “You and your team fly into New York to record an important podcast over the weekend with a high-profile guest. This opportunity has taken a long time to arrange, and the guest is set to board a plane in two hours to fly to New York for the show.”

“Upon landing, you realise it’s July 4th – a US holiday, meaning all shops are closed for the weekend, and you are unable to purchase the critical equipment needed to record the podcast the next morning. What do you do?” Curiously, there is no option to “sack the moron who didn’t realise that 4th of July was a thing.”

It’s all like this – a combination of mad hustle-and-grind culture with a strange undertone of mea culpa and self-flagellation, where every question and its construction clearly points respondents towards the answer that says “no, really, take my skin and use it as a dressing gown, I didn’t need it anyway; also, would you like to shift the deadline on that presentation forward by three days? I won’t mind at all; in fact, I will be grateful!”