America is a country of gamers. According to USA Today, two-thirds of all Americans play video games. That’s around 227 million people across the country who value game-play in their daily lives. So it’s no wonder that gamification has become a huge part of workplace processes in the past few decades.
Gamification involves applying gaming principles to other activities, and it has had interesting effects on recruitment strategy. According to recruiting experts, gamification helps employers appear innovative and increases interest in job openings. Most importantly, gamification can also help recruiters get a better preview of an applicant’s skills.
Examples of recruitment gamification:
Coding challenges
Hackathon
Quick-write story challenge
Role-playing
Simulations
Skill assessments
Puzzles
Google once used a billboard to lure recruits with high-level math skills to apply. They posed a math question, which only people with great skill could solve without looking up the answer.
The solution to the question led to further problems to solve, eventually leading to a web page that read, “One thing we learned while building Google is that it's easier to find what you're looking for if it comes looking for you. What we're looking for are the best engineers in the world. And here you are.”
As you can imagine, this was very effective. In this case, recruitment gamification worked to weed out candidates that didn’t have the skills they needed for the job while attracting the exact type of candidates they were looking for at the same time. It considered the unique traits of the recruits they wanted to attract and applied that to the game model.
Job search sites like Indeed and LinkedIn have quizzes that job seekers can complete to show they have certain skill sets. Some job postings even require job seekers to complete quizzes and pass a certain percentage score in order to move on to the next part of the hiring process.
Quizzes help ensure only the applicants who meet certain job requirements progress in the application process. Also, people who aren’t serious may not complete the quiz, narrowing the applicant pool to only the desirable candidates.
However, not all jobs have skills that are easily tested with a math problem or multiple-choice quiz. In these cases, games that require candidates to make real-world decisions so that recruiters can assess their actions work best. This could include games like role-playing to see how an applicant might deal with a difficult customer. Some companies even invest in video-game-style simulations created to test reactions to various scenarios.
Not all recruitment gamification requires expensive outsourced solutions or complicated tools. HR departments and recruiters can easily put together games for applicants themselves, especially if they are using a robust applicant tracking system.
Proliant’s Applicant Tracking and Recruitment solution includes a flexible job application builder, modern interface, mobile capabilities, and more to provide candidates with an excellent experience and businesses the competitive edge to win rockstar talent.
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