Play Games to Recruit! Gamification and Other Non-Traditional Interview Methods

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[et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”]With all the books and articles out there on conquering interviews (a few of which I’m guilty of writing) smart people have more or less figured out how to master even the most challenging questions. Due to this as a recruiter it becomes frustrating when you ask questions and receive answers which the respondent believes you want to hear rather than the truth.

To break the cycle, I bring you 3 non-traditional interview methods. From the crucial behavioral interview to the controversial brain teasers and finally gamification, each of these has different information that can be extract to see if you’ve found the “right fit”.

Behavioral Interviews

In an interview about what constitutes a “Successful Interview” Laszio Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google said that Brain Teasers should be forgotten and focus should be placed on behavioral interviews. THAT’s how important they are. I don’t think that any standard list of “Ideal Behavioral Interview Questions” can be provided to an organization. After all, the entire purpose is to link the respondents past behavior to real events that may occur in their new position.

What you can do, is create categories as identified by Recruiting Division and plug in questions that you find online:

• Organization Culture Fit
  Example: How have you handled an embarrassing or uncomfortable situation at work?
• Level of Passion
  Example: Have you ever gone above and beyond what was expected of you
• Business Problem Solving Skills
  Example: Tell me about you role in a team that you’ve worked with?

Here’s something to keep in mind: there’s a “STAR” answering technique for behavioral interviews which is quickly become popular online. This involves the following standard response to the questions:

•  S – Situation: What the situation was
•  T – Task: What was required of the employee
•  A – Activity: What the employee did
•  R – Result: What results were achieved

If someone responds with the STAR technique, you know they’ve done their research on being interviewed in this style.

Brain Teasers

Though Google may be ditching brainteaser type questions such as

“How many tennis balls can you fit inside a rocket ship?”

I still find value in brain teasers and quirky questions because they let you gauge if a candidate can think quickly on their feet. It’s all about the logic that the candidate displays – not whether they arrive at the right answer or not. Of course this isn’t to say that you should be asking only this type of question but if you’ve got a job opening which requires logic, I still think a couple brain teasers really lets you see the problem solving attitude of the candidate.

Some of my favorite examples are:

• How many Spikes are there on the back of a hedgehog?
• In an average week, do more people play football, or watch a football match?

Visit Oliver Wyman’s very interesting list of brain teasers to find more questions and answers.

Gamification

This maybe the most eyebrow raising recruitment technique, especially for conservative companies. However, using games for recruitment has been highlighted as one of the top 10 HR technology trends by the Society of Human Resource Management for 2014. If you’re not going to implement it you must at least be aware of it.

Take for example Wasabi Waiter. It places the candidate in a Sushi restaurant and says that you’ll be able to shortlist candidates, identify those who are most efficient and diligent and even help you with you company strategy. The game itself is simple but the algorithms behind it are created with recruitment in mind.

You don’t have to implement a proper game to jump into the world of gamification. Consider doing the following activities to make the process more fun (and fruitful) for everyone:

1. Give people points for visiting your company website, more for the recruitment section.
2. Launch competitions using social media to encourage marketing skills. L’Oreal does a brilliant job with their Brandstorm campaign which actually converts ideas into products.
3. Use virtual worlds such as Second Life to hold virtual Job Fairs. If KPMG and IBM have experimented with this, you can too – especially if you’re recruiting the younger generation.

Gamificaiton is definitely a more extreme interview method than the other two but it’s time to break the chains of traditional thinking and move into a very exciting world of HR. I’d love to know if you’ve used non-traditional recruitment methods. Please share them in the comments below.

Photo Credit: Adam N. Ward via Compfight cc[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column]
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