If you were to consider an employee’s career path it’s filled with challenges, choices to be made, the acquisition of knowledge, interactions with people, a strive for growth and progress, and of course the fulfillment that comes from being rewarded. These are all the things an employee seeks from their career. These are also the things a gamer seeks from a game they play. You could even say, if your employees were gamers, then your company is playing the Talent Game. A game of creating livelihoods, enriching the employee experience and tying in each employees’ success to that of the company’s.
No matter which HR practice you think of – recruitment, performance management, talent management, employee engagement or retention – gamification is fundamentally changing it. So how exactly does your company play the Talent Game? How does it ensure that its practices will ultimately enable it to meet its goals from the right set of people, at the right time and at the right cost?
The Talent Game
Let’s be honest with ourselves, a company’s true strength isn’t really its innovative product or service. It’s really the sum of the highly skilled, highly engaged and highly talented employees it has. Knowing this fact intensifies the talent market where the hunt for, acquisition, development and retention of talent is essentially an extremely competitive game that most companies are playing.
Each player in the game (the candidates or employees) bring with them certain challenges for the company. Also, market dynamics and practices add on to the constraints and rules of the game as well. How quickly your company understands, adapts and conforms to these rules is how well you’ll play the Talent Game. And, of course, the better you are at the Talent Game the better your chances of attracting the right talent, developing and retaining them, and of course, extracting the best of their potential.
The Need For Change
Traditionally, the HR function’s purpose has been to identify candidates, assess their adequacy to be employed through interviews, train and develop them using standard courses and answer questions related to the culture of the company. Beyond that HR really didn’t do much else in terms of finding and inducting talent.
However, because we’re in a time of rapid and accelerated growth traditional ways of doing business aren’t relevant or apt any longer. And with it, traditional HR practices have also been deemed obsolete. Today, companies and their HR functions are facing immense pressure to efficiently and effectively onboard talent to meet the escalating growth of the company’s objectives and goals. They’re also finding it challenging to address the constant shortage of critical skills in the talent market. And of course, the traditional hiring process and programs are no longer enticing for candidates anymore. To attract really skilled and talented individuals there’s much innovation that’s needed in the entire recruitment process.
Enter Gamification
At The Talent Games we recognize these challenges companies are facing and have developed a way to not only adapt to this change, but finally have the tool to address it. The value add to the hiring process that’s needed can and has been addressed by gamification. What is gamification? It’s just as its name suggests – a game!
Who plays games? Well, just about anyone who has had a computer or a mobile device. At some point in their lives and probably some form of a game, everyone’s played at least one game. Why do they play games? People have a natural desire to be competitive, a need for achievement, a knack to solve problems and make decisions, build status and indulge in self-expression. When you apply gamification to the workplace, you’re allowing your employees to express all these emotions and demonstrate these characteristics through the games they play. All of these are then processed to provide HR and line managers meaningful insights and information about their employees.
Gamification is versatile and offers the opportunity for companies to simulate their working environment to create selection techniques that can help you identify the best candidate suited for your company. You’ll not only be able to rightly access the candidate’s skills, but also analyze how well they’ll fit with your culture and what validated promise they bring to your company. The measurement of a candidate that you’re able to make through gamification is much more in-depth and detailed than the interview process or assessment tests.
Gamification was a new idea not too long ago. Today, it’s probably the fasting growing enabler for the HR function across the globe. We at The Talent Games have developed a ready-to-deploy gamification solution that addresses the recruitment challenges companies are currently facing. The modules we use create an engaging and interactive experience that uses badges, points and leaderboards to visually simulate and motivate your employees (the gamers).
Your company too can win the Talent Game – it’s just a matter of gamifying your HR function!
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Paul Keijzer is the CEO and Founder of Engage Consulting and the co-Founder of The Talent Games, which aims to transform HR by digitising talent processes and creating more engaging and productive workplaces through gamification and mobile technology. As a global HR and Leadership Management expert, Paul knows how to combine business insights with people insights to transform organisations and put them on the path to growth.