Over the past decade or more, gamification has been effectively used to enhance learning experiences in the education sector. It’s helped make learning fun, interactive and highly engaging. Also, students who go through gamified learning experiences have higher retention rates as well. The benefits of gamification have been so impactful that the business world has taken note of it and used it to its own advantage. You now see elements of gamification in marketing and sales, employee engagement and can even experience it in the form of gamified recruitment.

The benefit reaped from gamified recruitment impacts both parties, the candidates and the employers.

Candidates can experience a recruitment process that’s unparalleled, innovative, interaction, engaging, educational in terms of the hiring company’s culture and job requirements and unbiased.

While for hiring companies, gamified recruitment allows them to significantly enhance their talent pool, make better selection of talent using the platform’s cognitive and behavioral assessments, strengthen their brand value as an innovative and creative company, and be able to attract and retain the right talent.

It’s a win-win for both, candidates and companies!

So how can you use gamified recruitment to your advantage and start to seriously hire the right and top talent? Here are 5 ways to do this.

1. Conduct Virtual Job Fairs

If you’re a candidate who’s on the hunt for career and job fairs, it’s going to be massively challenging to attend most of the ones you’re interested in. Think about it, how could you possible be in two places at the same time, or attend job fairs day after day. It’s exhausting and pretty soon you won’t be able to present your best self. That’s why virtual job fairs work miracles for candidates. They’re easy to design using a gamified recruitment platform so companies don’t have to heavily invest time and resources setting one up. Plus, being virtual means you can attract talent from all corners of the world (though there may be challenges in relocating them, however, your reach is virtually limitless!). Just imagine the size of the talent pool that’ll visit your job fair if you were to provide them a virtual experience.

2. Organize Competitions

You don’t want to hire just about anyone do you? You want the best talent, the right fit and the most skilled resource to be in your team. Let the candidates battle it out so that only the best remains standing. How do you do this? You organize competitions using your gamified recruitment platform. The candidates who’ll actually participate will be ones who really possess the skills and capabilities to really compete. The ones who are passionate about the job. This alone eliminates candidates who just love to throw their resumes around even if they don’t meet the job requirements. The competitions you arrange will test candidates against the criteria you set, specific to your company’s and job’s requirements. What you’ll gain is positive exposure as an innovative employer, and moreover, the right talent.

3. Test Candidates

Verifying qualifications and experiences is the easy part of recruitment. Besides the main purpose verifying these serves is to validate that candidates can do the current job they’re being hired for. But you’re not hiring for today are you? You want to hire future leaders. And to do that you need to assess their ability to solve problems, perform under pressure, whether or not they possess cognitive thinking. You need to get a better understanding of who your candidates are and gather valuable data about them, which you now can using tests in your gamified recruitment platform. And while the right talent for you may not be the best on paper, the tests, puzzles and problems they solve will enable you to sift out the most capable one.

4. Display Progress Bars

Progress bars are a great way to visualize how far you’ve come along. It’s being used then you create a profile on certain websites or doing surveys. The ability to visualize your progress helps give users an idea of how close they are to their goal. Basically, in the gamified recruitment world, it helps candidates stay focused. And that’s precisely what you need from your candidates. The more focused they are, the more committed they’ll be and, hence the more effort they’ll put it. That just means you’ll be able to see their best performance. Progress bars provide a quick visual feedback of the ground they’ve covered and helps to engage and motivate candidates to keep aiming for the reward at the end.

5. Conduct Video Interviews

Going through half the way interviewing candidates is highly time consuming and often very less rewarding for the recruiter. After all that effort you could end up hiring maybe just one candidate (sometimes it’s not even that single candidate). That’s highly frustrating. Using a gamified recruitment platform you can have candidates save their video interviews as they progress in the game. The benefit of this is that the interview itself isn’t long and cumbersome for both and you, as the recruiter, can view the videos whenever you like. Also, you won’t have to view video interviews of every candidate. The beauty of the entire gamified recruitment platform is that you can sift out candidates so that you’re spending more time viewing video interviews of only the top talent.

Like most recruiters and hiring managers you too must be faced with the challenge of hiring the right and top talent for your company. And that’s why you should try gamified recruitment platforms such as The Talent Games’ C-Factor. You’ll not only be able to make the entire recruitment process more cost effective and less stressful, but also be gathering valuable information about the best talent out there.

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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.