Success Stories of Gamification in Recruitment

Typical job interviews and recruitment processes no longer yield any favourable results for the company. It has been observed that common interview questions often prove ineffective at assessing the candidate’s true potential. Nowadays most candidates are aware of the generic interview questions and come prepared with planned answers for the interview process. Thus, while job interviews help to illustrate the job qualification of the candidate, it is a boring process.

What must you do differently then? Assessing candidates is necessary before hiring them. At the same time, an ineffective hiring process would result in hiring an unqualified candidate, which will result in further rehiring expenses.

Remote hiring and recruiting

In such cases, you have to find innovative ways to assess and screen candidates for the job. One such innovative concept is gamification.

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the use of interactive gaming to attract the interest of customers towards your company and to build a positive brand connect. Since a long time, gaming has been used by various companies to enhance their customer engagement and to boost their brand recollect among the customers.

Of late, this radical yet innovative concept has gained immense popularity in the recruitment industry. Gamification in recruitment has been extensively used by various hiring companies to attract prospective candidates towards the company and to assess their skills and knowledge for the job with the help of gaming.

Hiring companies mainly use interactive games such as challenges, quizzes or behavioural evaluations, to add a fun element to the dull interview process and the overall recruitment process. At the same time, gamification helps to assess the candidate’s problem-solving skills, aptitude and creative thinking abilities.

So, let us check the success stories of some companies that indulged in gamification in recruitment.

Google Code Jam

Code Jam is an annual coding competition organised by tech giant Google and one of the best examples of gamification in HR. This gaming competition doubles up as their recruitment process. It is their way of finding new talented coders to work for the company.

Ideally, engineers and developers, who enrol for the contest, actually compete to win the monetary prize. Google uses it as a platform to attract potential candidates with the right skills required for the job and the company.

The winners of the contest, or, the ideal candidates are, eventually, offered a job at the company.

Domino’s Pizza Mogul

The pizza mogul interactive game by Dominos is a great way of customer engagement and helps them build a positive brand association. In this game, the customer earns monetary rewards for creating their dream pizza. They even have the option to order it at the store.

Although this is more of a brand-building and awareness tool rather than being directly linked to the job interview process, it does intrigue applicants. Wherein, when a young person is looking for work, they will think of Dominos Pizza as an interactive and fun workplace. This game helps build a positive image as a company that is creative, innovative, fun and open for new ideas.

Siemens Plantsville

This is another brilliant example of gamification in HR.

Siemens introduced the highly popular game Plantsville, wherein, the player stands in for the plant manager at the company’s manufacturing facility. They believe that this generates interest among the young for a career in manufacturing.

In this game, the company shows the player, who is a prospective candidate, the daily roles and responsibilities of the facility manager. This gives a sense to the candidate about the job responsibilities of the plant manager.

The game has gained immense interest among the prospective candidates and has resulted in better recruitment for the company. According to Siemens, it is a great way to find the ideal candidate with the right job qualifications.

My Marriot Hotel

Another success story of recruitment based gaming is from Marriot. Their game, My Marriott Hotel, is run on the Marriot hotel chain’s career page on Facebook. In this game, players can virtually run the hotel. After which, they are redirected towards the job application page when they click on the “Do it for Real” button.

It is a great way to engage with prospects and find the right candidates for the job. Because only the ones interested to be associated with the company will fill up the application form. This results in quality leads for the company, which increases its hiring rate and solidifies their recruitment process.

Cryptic puzzles by Whirlpool

Whirlpool has been aggressively using gamification and social media to engage with prospective candidates and to keep their brand connect active. They upload cryptic puzzle games on their social media sites to connect with the prospects.

The success and active use of games by Whirlpool proves that gamification in HR is a successful endeavour with tremendous results.

Badgeville by Deloitte

The Deloitte Leadership Academy, a renowned training and development academy that has trained over 11,000 executives from around the globe, delivers learning through gamification with their game Badgeville. This gaming helps to improve brand development and knowledge sharing.

The success of Deloitte’s training program is a testimony to the success of gamification, not just in recruitment, but in training and development as well.

Jeu Facteur Academy by Formapost

Formapost is a French postal service company, which had to struggle a lot with retaining its employees. After the trial period, about a quarter of the new employees left the firm. This mass attrition hit the company and its finances severely. With a clear and singular goal of improving the employee retention percentage, the company switched to gamification.

They launched the game, Jeu Facteur Academy. This game allowed players, who are mostly potential candidates, to “live” 1 week as a newly hired postal carrier. This game included situations such as getting up early, learning postal work and even learning about ethics while on the job.

This gamification effort found immense success immediately. The attrition rate went down from 26% to 9%, after the introduction of this game. It also helped with new candidate interviews and the overall hiring process. It was observed that the new hires were better prepared for the job and asked better questions after having played the game.

Conclusion

Gamification in the hiring process is a great way to identify and gauge the skills and expertise of your candidates. It gives a new dimension to the interview process and selection, allowing you more insight into the true characteristics and capabilities of the prospective candidate. Plus, it helps you build a great brand image.

Games have a great recall value, and, as they help a company with recruitment as well as customer engagement.