Remember the time when you started your career? How good it felt when you got your first pat on the back from your boss, or when you made your first sale? And how exciting was it working on your first project with a team of talented people? Now let’s fast forward to the present day. Your career has progressed over the years. You’ve gotten better at what you do and your scope of work has expanded. However, that excitement and joy of work has diminished. What happened over the years to get you to a point where you’re not as happy or excited as you were at the start of your career?

Over the course of your career you’ve gotten used to processes and your job. Work has become normalized and mundane. You’ve gotten so familiar with situations and things at the office that it’s second nature and habitual. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Almost 90% of a company’s workforce experiences this at least once in their career. What you and everyone need is a catalyst that can springboard your excitement and passion for your job once again. And for that your company needs gamification!

What’s Gamification All About?

By implementing gamification you’re not inventing or creating anything new, so you can breathe easy to start with. What you’re doing is taking something that already exists in your company and fusing game mechanics to it. The resultant is a highly engaging, interactive and motivating platform that’ll make work fun and exciting again. Essentially you’re transforming the dull, mundane and repetitive elements of work into something that’s attractive for your employees.

Gamification and Millennials

Remember that saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”? Well it’s really relevant today, more than ever. And that’s because 82% of millennials are more likely to return to news sites that are visually stimulating. Furthermore, articles with visuals have an 85% chance of being read by millennials. Why’s that important? Well millennials are the fastest growing group of individuals in companies, worldwide. And if these companies really want to attract, retain, motivate and productively utilize this group of workforce, they’ll pay close attention to their behavior. From the facts above, millennials really care about being visually engaged, and gamification provides just that solution.

Through gamification, companies can keep up with the industry, engage with their talent in a creative, fun way that can help them attract the right talent and drive them to achieve success using a visually stimulating platform.

Gamification in Recruitment

Imagine if you could engage your candidates in a whole new way through games. Marriott, PWC, Siemens and EY are all doing it, so what’s stopping you. Using gamification you can engage with candidates and new recruits to boost their chances of success with the company and to ensure only the best and right fitted get selected. By harnessing the power of mobile technology, gamification platforms like The Talent Games open the possibility for companies to increase traffic and size of their candidate pool. It also provides your candidates with an intuitive way to learn about the job, the company itself and its culture.

You know how frustrating it is to hunt high and low, go through interview after interview to finally find the right candidate and then, boom, they leave in a few weeks. What a loss of time, resources and energy. You could save yourself all that hassle if you had gamification on your side. With it, the application process becomes less cumbersome for the candidates, the assessments are more realistic and free of bias, and the result is a new recruit who’s aligned to the company from the first day at work.

Think of gamification as a tool that takes candidates out of the dark into an illustrious and illustrated world that’s exciting, fun, and can truly identify their talent. Users (candidates) have completion percentages to show how far they’ve come into the ‘game’, earn scores and badges for the progress they make and can interact with other candidates to showcase their teamwork skills.

The interview process can also be enhanced and redefined using gamification. You could incorporate various checkpoints and screenings where your candidates can see the points they’ve earned and how they fair against a rating system and other candidates. It’s a whole new level of healthy competition that’s engaging and really beneficial for the candidates and company.

Gamifying your recruitment process through technology is the best way you can keep millennials interested in working with you.

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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.