When you think of “games at the workplace” you’re probably thinking of a foosball table or a game of chess that colleagues can play to unwind and connect over. But what if you could use “games” to attract talent, retain them and boost their performance!

The Future of Recruitment Today: Gamification

Gamification is the revolution that the recruitment process has been yearning for. Not only does it make recruitment fun and interactive for the candidates, it enhances the employer’s ability to tap into a larger talent pool, boosts their brand image and significantly impacts the process’s effectiveness. To add icing to it all, once the candidates are hired their experience playing the “game” helps transition them into the organization with ease. This, of course, will give new recruits a softer landing when they walk into a new organization and enhance your chances of retaining them. All because you’ve already familiarized them with your organization’s culture and your expectations off them.

Through the Selection App developed by The Talent Games, recruitment is given an innovative, creative and unique approach – you could say recruitment has finally been reinvented! Employers gain the ability to look deeper into what candidates flaunt in their resumes and say during interviews. Similarly, candidates get insights into the culture, environment and job requirements of their future employers, allowing them to get familiar with what to expect. With a better understanding of the job and organizational culture candidates are ready for challenges from the day they join, hence, you’ll see enhancements in their performance and productivity. This also helps reduce those exits that occur in the first few weeks of joining. Recruitment hasn’t ever been this fun, interactive and effective. And it all comes in a feasible tailor-made solution.

The Challenges of Talent Management

For decades the Human Resource function has faced massive challenges hunting and recruiting talent. If that wasn’t enough, to add to it all, they also face the difficult task of retaining talent. Several strategies have evolved over the years – some more successful than others – to address these concerns. However, the challenge of attracting and retaining talent hasn’t gotten less demanding for HR professionals.

Today’s rapid pace and flow of communication has led to behavioral change in people, whereby attention spans have shortened. In the talent market, millennials – who primarily are the bulk of the new talent – are communicated much faster than ever before. Thanks to mobile messaging services, social media and enhanced workplace communication tools people are more connected and informed. And even though employers have shifted their search for talent to the internet (career pages, LinkedIn, etc.), it seems they still aren’t able to capture the talent’s attention for longer than 10 minutes. That simply isn’t enough time for job seekers to ascertain if they really are interested in (or aligned with) the employer whose site they visited. This could very well be the reason why talent is slipping passed employers and why they are struggling to attract them.

Then there’s another challenge faced by these organizations. New recruits realize within the first few weeks of joining whether or not their new employer is aligned with their career aspirations. This adversely impacts an organization which has spent several of its resources searching, selecting and finally on-boarding talent that left in a matter of weeks. It’s a serious concern for HR professionals and leaders, particularly when all that effort goes to waste.

So how do employers enhance their candidates’ experience? How do they engage the ‘right’ talent that’s interested in working with them? And how do they increase retention, particularly for new recruits?

Using Gamification in Talent Management

To address the challenges of talent management, The Talent Games developed a state of the art recruitment platform that leverages social media to create an employer brand experience which goes beyond traditional recruitment touchpoints. Its appeal engages more than the millennials because it highlights unique strengths of its candidates in a real-time competitive game environment. Candidates are presented with business problems that they would experience on the job allowing them to exhibit their skills and abilities to their prospective employers.

The Selection App can help you attract and retain talent in a unique and interactive way. Here’s a quick look at what the Selection App offers your organization:

• Leveraging the power of social media to effectively and efficiently enhance your selection process and simultaneously reduce your costs associated with it.
• Strong employer brand image enabling you to have visibility of and ability to attract talent from all corners of the talent market.
• Smart analytics with the ability to make data-driven decisions gained from the app’s usage and assessment of candidates.
• Significant bottom line impact of selecting the best and most aligned talent in a speedy and efficient manner.
• Enhanced retention of joiners through the familiarity and insight they gain from the App about your environment and culture.

Gamification has proved to be a massive success for candidates and employers. Here at The Talent Games, we ran the program for a large conglomerate in Pakistan and found that they were able to:

• attract 50% more candidates for vacancies they advertised
• decrease turnaround time by 70%, and
• reduce costs by 80%.

Looking at it from the candidates’ perspective, the numbers were equally optimistic. 91% of the candidates found that the games were relevant to the job and organization they were applying to.  Furthermore, 80% of the users (the candidates) reported the game had enhanced their recruitment process. These numbers are strong indicators of the positive impact gamification can have on the employer brand.

In this bold new age where millennials are eager for rapid growth and challenging work environments the demands are high for organizations to present themselves as the platform of choice where they can excel. The Talent Games realizes this challenge and have designed a unique, powerful, cutting edge and first of its kind solution that doesn’t only address these challenges, but gives your brand the boost it needs to be the employer of choice.

Gamification is the perfect anecdote that today’s talent management requires. It’s what your organization needs to bring in true talent that’s geared for success!

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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.