Reeling in the Security Recruits

Computerworld - I like to think of myself as a dedicated worker, but I do have limits. I don't mind weekend work if we suffer a major incident, but last weekend I was asked to be an assessor for my company's college recruitment program. I suppose I could have declined, but my cooperation was expected. I dragged myself into the office, along with my grumpy attitude.
Our human resources department runs an annual program to recruit IT talent from the best schools. HR reps visit the colleges and administer a long multiple-choice exam to assess candidates' technical, verbal and logical-thinking skills. We then invite the cream of the crop to our offices for a weekend of testing and interviews.
The candidates spent all day Friday taking network, coding and personality tests. Then the candidates with scores in the top 10% were put up in a swanky hotel for the weekend.
Saturday was filled with a series of team-building challenges followed by interviews. My job was to assess the candidates' performance in the team challenges and interview them to see how well they would fit into our company -- and my team. I don't have any permanent positions open, but I do have openings for a summer intern and a nine-month placement.
I'm sworn to secrecy about the challenges we put the candidates through, but I can say that the teams all faced surprises halfway through so we could see how well they coped with stressful situations.
The team scores they got in the challenges didn't matter. We were looking for individuals who displayed leadership, negotiation ability and sensitivity to others during the team exercises, not the team that achieved the best result.
The filtering at the earlier stages worked; the candidates were all frighteningly bright. It was almost worth missing out on a free weekend to see them perform. But having so many stars on each team also led to friction. They were all pretty nervous, and I suppose the reviewers wandering past with clipboards didn't help.
The teams had a tendency to split into smaller groups of people who agreed with one another rather than reaching a team consensus. I think they worried that if they gave in from their original positions, we'd downgrade them. In fact, the opposite was the case.
After the challenges were over, we interviewed the candidates. Each candidate had two interviews with different staffers.
Certainly, these graduates had amazing resumes. I recall how little I'd done when I was leaving college. The bar has risen since