Do you play well with others? You're hired!

Not Lindblad. It sends job applicants a DVD showing not one, but two shots of a crew member cleaning toilets. A dishwasher talks about washing 5,000 dishes in one day. “Be prepared to work your butt off,” another says.

“It’s meant to scare you off,” company founder Sven Lindblad said.

It does. After watching the DVD and hearing an unvarnished description of life onboard a Lindblad ship, the majority of applicants drop out, Thompson said.

New hires “undergo a drug test, a physical exam, they have to pack up their life, we buy them a plane ticket and outfit them with hundreds of dollars in uniforms,” Thompson said. “If they get on board and say, ’This is not what I expected,’ then shame on us.”

She asks applicants to tell her about a job that wasn’t what they expected and how they dealt with it. One of the best answers came from Kendra Nelsen, who said that while she was working construction, her male co-workers would help themselves to her tools. Her solution: She painted all her tools hot pink. Nelsen, who started as a deck hand, went on to earn a U.S. Coast Guard license and was just named assistant expedition leader in Antarctica.

At KaBoom, a nonprofit that builds playgrounds, the board was hammering co-founder and CEO Darell Hammond four years ago over the organization’s high employee turnover.

“I rationalized that they were on the road too much, when in reality, it was the wrong fit in the wrong role,” he said.

He started thinking about who left and why, then focused on the characteristics of workers who stayed. The list of traits: Can do, will do, team fit, damn quick and damn smart.

His team kept a closer eye on job applicants in the reception area, which is set up as a playground, to see how they acted around playground equipment.

“If you’re early, you may have to sit on a swing or the bottom of a slide,” Hammond said. People who stand with a tight grip on their briefcases instead of sitting on the playground equipment aren’t asked back.

KaBoom sends prospective project managers to one of its four-day playground building trips, with the actual build on the last day involving 200 to 300 volunteers, many of whom have questions for KaBoom staff.

“If they’re not easily approached, or they’re easily stressed — this is the way we find out and they find out if it’s not going to work,” he said.

Hammond wouldn’t say what percentage of applicants drop out, but he did say project managers’ tenure has increased since they started sending them on the trips four years ago, from one year’s tenure to between two-and-a-half and three years.

“We got more passionate people who stayed longer,” Hammond said. “What was going to be expected of them when they came on board wasn’t a stab in the dark.”

Hammond said he isn’t afraid of scaring people off, since the best candidates “are constantly looking at themselves to excel, not just cross the finish line, but blow through the finish line.”

When all 90 of the people on his staff meet that criteria, he said, “It’s incredible. If you have 89 who do and one who doesn’t — it’s painful.”

MORE FROM CAREERS

Careers Section Front

Laid-off cubicle dwellers pursue trucking jobs   Dealing with workplace bullies Your Career: Top secret jobs at the CIA Employers find online restrictions questioned Your Career: Take this job and shove it! Asking God for peace, and help in job search Older job seekers struggling with age barrier Your Career: Getting paid to lose weight Life of a star: Go to a party, and get paid for it Your career: Empathy matters at work Careers Section Front   Add Careers headlines to your news reader: