A San Francisco start-up brought in some help. They created an engaging recruiting tool for their company with the vital help of Doug Hoogland, former homeschooler. Doug is the youngest son of Karen and David Hoogland. Karen is a long-time Illinois homeschool advocate with some computer/website skills under her belt too.
Start-Up Uses Portal Game as Recruiting Tool By Nick Wingfield New York Times Bits
Mr. Bisciglia got the idea to use the game as a recruiting tool after seeing the work of Doug Hoogland, who helped create a custom version of Portal 2 (called a mod in the gamer community) for a man who used it as a wedding proposal. Mr. Bisciglia estimates that half of the engineers at WibiData play Portal 2, which Valve encourages people to mod.
WibiData flew Mr. Hoogland to San Francisco to tour its offices and provided him with architectural renderings of the space so he could faithfully create a virtual version of it in the game.
I want to apply for a job there just to play the game! But I suspect my computer skills will give me the hook in the reception room.
Here’s another one. Founder and CEO of Tumblr: David Kulp
In his own words, he “pretty much dropped out of high school…was technically homeschooled the last three years…” Worked for him. Here’s the Forbes Cover Story video below and there’s more information here:
As an aside of sorts, Karen Hoogland also wrote a Home Education Magazine article [Education Without Medication] back in 2001. It’s still timely as many kids are pulled out of schools to get away from the medication pressures. High-energy kids have a hard time sitting in those seats all day. Boys seem to have the worse problem being singled out in schools.
Educational freedom seems to prove most useful for our young adults that were homeschooled.
Update - Douglas was also in this Wired magazine article:
“It’s borderline creepy how accurate the finished product turned out,” he [WibiData Biciglia CEO] says. Hoogland wrote the game’s story, which features Bisciglia as a bumbling CEO who repeatedly forgets his PIN for the WibiData jobs website.