Jaguar Land Rover Uses Gorillaz App to Recruit Coders

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Want to work as a coder for Jaguar Land Rover? Better brush up on your puzzle-solving skills.

The automaker on Monday became the latest big company to recruit software engineers with game-based puzzles, unveiling an augmented reality smartphone app in partnership with the virtual band Gorillaz. The company said that prospective applicants who are able to solve the game's puzzles will be "fast-tracked" through the recruitment process.

Jaguar Land Rover is looking to hire 5,000 people this year, including more than 1,000 electronic and software engineers. It also has a marketing relationship with Gorillaz, a virtual band created in 1998 that consists of four animated members: Gorillaz guitarist Noodle is Jaguar's Formula E race team mascot. So why not combine the two to find skilled geeks who want a coding job?

To participate in the challenge, applicants will have to download the latest Android or iOS version of the Gorillaz app. They'll then be faced with the first of Jaguar Land Rover's two challenges: a 360-degree view of the Gorillaz virtual garage and an opportunity to assemble iconic Jaguars and Land Rovers. The app's second part is much more challenging and will test their "curiosity, persistence, lateral thinking and problem solving skills" with a series of augmented reality puzzles, the company said.

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Jaguar Land Rover hopes its recruiting foothold in the Gorillaz app will attract more talented programmers to the auto industry, which it said suffers from a skills gap.

"As the automotive industry transforms over the next decade, fuelled by software innovation, we have to attract the best talent and that requires a radical rethink of how we recruit," Jaguar Land Rover Head of Electrical Engineering Alex Heslop said in a statement.

Other companies using apps, games, or puzzles to attract software engineering talent include Uber, which last year began offering a game called Code on the Road to riders in cities with lots of tech industry workers, and Google, which disguised coding puzzles in search results that programmers were likely to stumble across.

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