Gamification is fast becoming a popular and widely used buzzword in the corporate world. Its application has benefited several industries, numerous functions and thousands of talented individuals. However, there still are some who don’t truly understand how to leverage the benefits of gamification to fulfill their corporate strategies. Putting their doubts to ease is how successful gamification has been in an organization’s pursuit to hire the right talent.
Just how can you stay ahead of the industry norms and dated recruitment practices? Here’s a look at how gamification can propel your organization’s chances of truly hiring the right talent.
What is Gamified Recruitment?
Gamification is the application of game dynamics to non-gaming contexts and business strategies, such as marketing, sales, employee engagement, project management, and of course, recruitment, amongst others. Through gamification, the mundane and often boring aspects of corporate strategies can be made more engaging, motivating and fun! It can also enhance team cohesiveness, promote team spirit and collaborations and boost teams’ success rate of overcoming challenges.
Having said that, gamification isn’t specific to internal goals and objectives. Several organizations have used its abilities to get closer to their customers, understand their behavior, enhance consumer experience.
The most appealing aspect of gamification is its ability to provide ‘gamers’ incentives for actions. This, of course, brings to light those employees or individuals (gamers) who achieve high scores and display exceptional abilities in the game. And that’s why it’s the perfect solution for recruitment.
Related Article: What Is Gamification and How It Can Save Your Company
Why is Gamification Perfect for Recruitment?
Gamification is versatile in that it encompasses a wide range of recruitment steps all into one platform. From testing candidates’ skills and competencies, to AI driven analytics based on cognitive behavior and neurosciences, motivating candidates to complete tasks, to engaging them and fostering teamwork, gamification for recruitment does it all.
From the employer’s perspective, gamified hiring can boost your employer brand multiple folds! The perception it allows you to create is that your organization is innovative, unbiased, technically savvy, and is truly eager to hire the best and right talent. Basically your employer brand becomes highly attractive to candidates.
For the hiring managers gamification boosts their chances of hiring someone who truly is aligned with their requirements. That’s because the platform allows them to construct various situations that are focused on specific skill sets, personality traits and competencies. This is a unique empowerment that hiring managers never had before. Hiring managers can now dive into the minds of candidates to assess their drivers, problem solving abilities and truly test their capacity to perform in pressure situations.
And for the talent market gamification is a blessing! Why’s that? Well, candidates can now showcase their skills and competencies knowing that they’ll be selected on purely merit. Plus, through the gamified experience, candidates gain insights as to what daily life in the organization would look and feel like. In way, as they compete to be selected, they also get oriented on the organization’s culture, policies and environment.
How You Can Gamify Your Recruitment Process
Gamification is a versatile and highly customizable solution. Not only in recruitment, you can apply its benefits to various aspects of HR and other functions. And even with recruitment itself, you can gamify certain or all aspects of the hiring process. Here are just some of the ways you can gamify your recruitment process.
Competency Tests
By incorporating games, tests, multi-person discussions and problem-solving assignments you can gain valuable data and insights on your candidates’ competencies.
Real-Time Progress
Progress bars are a great way of informing candidates how far they’ve gotten in recruitment process (or how close they are to being selected). These provide candidates real-time progress so they can stay focused and keep their sights on the final ‘prize’.
Virtual Career Fairs
Assembling, entertaining and sifting through a hoard of resumes and candidates at career fairs can be a daunting (if not a nightmare-ish) ordeal. Through gamification career fairs are far more outreaching, attractive to candidates and ‘manageable’ for recruiters to shortlist the right talent.
Video Interviews
At various steps along the recruitment process you can prompt gamers (candidates) to answer questions which you’d normally ask in an interview. Their responses are captured and saved for you to view at a later time, giving you the opportunity to really interview multiple candidates simultaneously.
Engage with Candidates
At various stages of the gamified recruitment environment, hiring managers and HR professionals can engage with candidates to test, quiz and get to know candidates on the go. It’s a great way to engage with candidates and get to know them better as they progress through the game / recruitment process.
These are just a few examples of the areas of recruitment which you can gamify. To learn more about this, check out C-Factor and see how gamification can propel your chances of hiring the right talent.
Sure, even if you were to apply gamified strategies to most of your recruitment process there still may remain some aspects that are traditional. However, by jumping on the gamification bandwagon you’re enhancing your company’s abilities to really hire the best, most competent and of course the right talent.
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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.