Every time a new mobile app hits the market, the more unique it is, the more press it gets. Apps that deal with health or mental capabilities often attract particular attention. A recent app called Peak is one such, unique in that it saves your performance on brain games and compares your results with those of people who do a specific job, such as a doctor. Depending on your brain game scores, your aptitude for that occupation is said to be revealed.
Brain Apps or Brain Games?
For practical business use, these types of apps tend to have little value for either employer, employee, or potential employee. Though the app does have a statistical and scientific foundation behind it, there are a number of factors that can change the dynamic. For example, there are certain skills that can be learned which could increase the score of a given aptitude. We are also learning that there are ways your brain can be trained and retrained based on a physiological principle called neuroplasticity. Forget the science, the general idea is that neurons in the brain are what the average person would think of as elastic.
Practical Use of Brain Apps
A more serious approach to evaluating the use of Peak is whether it is hype, a game, or a business tool with limited value. One trend in both education and computer applications is that games have a practical value because they teach concepts such as problem solving and decision making. In the case of brain games, including the website Luminosity, puzzle games are played that will “exercise” certain parts of your brain with the result being an increased focus or mental agility. Peak does not seek to improve these cerebral characteristics, only measure them.
One reviewer wrote that one of the best things about Peak was the presence of graphs where you can compare your scores to your colleagues. That makes it sound more like a game for fun and entertainment rather than a serious business tool. Understanding your brain does not always help you use it.
High school and college counselors, career testing, and career counselors are all historical ways of discovering a person’s career potential. Yet in many cases all the testing and evaluating simply get it wrong. A business owner would certainly jump at the chance at using an app, or any system in fact, that would have an 85 percent accuracy rate in determining the success of a specific person in a specific position. It is reasonable to presume that if such evaluators existed we would know about them.
The Best Evaluators
The best evaluator for talent and success in a given position ultimately will be the business owner. Though human resource departments exist in part to evaluate talent, the small business owner, especially those running startups, have too much at risk to allow someone else to evaluate their potential hires. It is not an issue of competence as much as an issue of personal choice.
Before farming out the hiring of employees to an agency, it may be worthwhile to take a minute to consider this: maybe the way they evaluate talent and the potential candidates is to have them sit down and play some brain games. The ones with the top scores are sent over for you to make a final evaluation and decision on hiring. Hmmm – not so good!
