How the Equalture Bird Spotting game works
You are shown a bird to find and a group of birds that look alike, and you pick out the ones that match. Equalture does not publish how many birds there are, how long the game runs or exactly how the result is worked out.
Bird Spotting is one of Equalture’s behavioural preference games, which have no right or wrong answer. It places you between speed-inclined, someone who works well under time pressure and gets through a lot, and accuracy-inclined, someone who is careful with detail and rarely makes a careless mistake. Neither end is a better result. What the employer looks at is how your reading compares with people who do well in the role.
How to play Bird Spotting well
Since there is no better end, the aim is a reading that shows how you really work, played cleanly. Two habits help:
- Check the features of each bird in the same order every time, for example body, then wing, then head. Look-alikes are made to pass a glance, and a fixed order stops one slipping through on the features you did check.
- Settle into one pace and keep it. Speeding up near the end to catch up, or slowing right down after one mistake, blurs the picture of how you work.
- Read every instruction screen. It is the only place the controls and the counters are explained.
Worked example
The target is a blue bird with a yellow wing and a pointed crest. A group of 14 holds four exact matches. The other ten each get one feature wrong: a green body, an orange wing or a round crest.
Checking body, wing, crest in that order, a green bird is out at the first look, and an orange wing is out at the second. The round crests are the ones that catch people out, because body and wing both match and the eye stops checking. The fixed order is what catches them.
Tips for the real Bird Spotting game
- Play at your natural pace. Pushing yourself towards one end does not make the reading better, only less like you.
- Use a screen large enough to see small differences, and good light.
- Do not try to guess the profile the employer wants. It is built from its own staff and you cannot see it.
- Treat it as seriously as the other games. The employer still compares your reading with its own staff.
Practise Bird Spotting on CogniPrep
Flock Check is our own design with our own birds. It runs for 90 seconds. Each flock has 20 birds, of which 3 to 6 match the target on body colour, wing colour and crest. Tap the matches, or press New flock to move on early. We do not score it: at the end we describe where you sat between speed-inclined and accuracy-inclined in that sitting, using five labels from strongly speed-inclined to strongly accuracy-inclined.