Fri, 19 Oct 2012
Here’s an interesting recruitment experiment that took place in San Francisco – where else?

Maneesh Sethi decided his productivity was flagging, due to too many forays into sites such as Facebook and non-related work activity. So his answer was to put an advert on Craigslist (the online classified ads site) to recruit someone to slap him in the face every time he deviated across to social media sites and the like.Here was the ad he posted:

Title:(domestic gigs) Slap me if I get off task…
Hey!
I’m looking for someone who can work next to me at a defined location (my house or a mission cafe) and will make sure to watch what is happening on my screen. When I am wasting time, you’ll have to yell at me or if need be, slap me.
You can do your own work at the same time.

• Compensation: $8/hour, and you can do your own work from your computer at the same time.

After a deluge of responses (it was in San Francisco), the next day at 9am Kara appeared, ready and willing to let him have it. And the results? His average productivity was around 35-40% on most days, but when Kara sat next to him, his productivity skyrocketed to 98%.

So next time you or your staff are tempted to while away a few minutes browsing what your friends have been eating or where they’re going, why not hire a few ‘Karas’ to prod everyone with a sharpened stick or slap you all with a fresh fish? There have been worse suggestions to up productivity, surely…