“Magic” The Gathering” is a very popular card game. If you’re familiar with it, please skip down to the paragraph that begins with “Job placement is like ‘Magic’…” The rest of you can take in the brief description of the game that makes up the rest paragraph. In “Magic,” you play as a wizard capable of casting spells based on mana (energy) that comes in 6 different colors (red, blue, green, white, black and neutral). You assemble a deck of 60-80 cards, combining attack and defense spells, magic objects and other nifty wizardry things, shuffle the deck and play your cards. As you accumulate mana, you can then cast spells or use nifty wizardry things. But without mana, there is no magic.
Job placement is like ‘Magic’ in the following ways:
- You need to pick 1-2 colors for your deck: Job placement agencies can’t cover every possible variant of job skills and position requirements, so they focus on certain basic aspects and build around those. There is also a finite amount of people in the world looking for jobs, so the agency makes sure to find the best ones to keep on file as part of “the deck.”
- Combining colors is better than single colors: The balance in “Magic” rewards making good combinations of two or maybe three colors, so you look to choose cards that have this flexibility, the versatility needed to suit many situations.
- But you can’t play well with a deck that has every color: Let’s call this the “Trying to be everything for everyone means you aren’t enough for anyone” rule.
- Quantity is not as important as quality: “Magic” has over 4,000 cards available to play with, but you can only have a deck of a certain size to play. So it doesn’t matter if you have all 4,000+ cards, which ones are you going to use? Knowing the limitations, the goal is then to choose the best combinations, the most flexible options so you can perform well.
- The cards appear in a random sequence: Candidates arrive when they do, without centralized planning to make the process easier to manage. This also means that placing the right candidate in the best possible position has an element of luck to it, but that leads to the next similarity.
- The more you know your cards, the better you can combine them: Cards in “Magic” follow general rules, but their combinations can create new situations that alter the game’s basic design. This is how Sharpline sees it: we learn as much as we can about every candidate so as to place them in situations of maximum impact.
- It’s all about mana: Nothing happens in “Magic” unless you have invested mana. A placement agency has to invest its energy in order to make the candidate-position wizardry come alive. Magic takes work, and while a card game can make it entertaining, our goal is to make the magic connection a successful reality.
By Gil C. Schmidt, Sharpline Contributor
