How to Gamify the Recruitment Process

Gamification is not a new concept. In fact, it’s increasingly becoming the norm in the workplace. Gamification encourages innovation, employee engagement and healthy competition into the mix of the workday. So it’s no wonder that gamification is starting to be used during the recruitment process to help liven things up, as well as make things more convenient for recruiters.

What is Gamification? 

By definition, gamification is the practice of using game theory, game mechanics and gaming design to help engage and motivate individuals towards a goal or achievement in a non-game setting like school or work, or even during the shopping experience. Companies have been using gamification tactics to help improve their customers’ or employees’ interest in their brand, leveling up their engagement. 

Today, in a highly competitive market, most companies believe that using gamification can help them stand out from their competition. So, if companies have been successfully using gamification to help them with customer experience, as well as worker experience, why not use those same strategies for recruitment? Here is why gamifying your recruitment process can help you attract and hire top talent. 

Reasons to Use Gamification During the Recruitment Process

During the typical recruitment process, the interview is where a candidate shows their ability to self-evaluate. Usually, candidates will pre-plan their answers while the interviewer tries to get to know the candidate on a deeper level, by trying to understand how they will behave and what their values are as a worker. 

This is where gamification can make a big difference in the hiring process. By using gamification during the common interviewing process, you can use things like quizzes, company-related quests, behavioral tests and other industry challenges to help make screening candidates more engaging, conversational and meaningful to both parties involved. Gamification can also reveal how creative an applicant can be, what their aptitude for innovation is and their problem-solving capabilities. 

Gamification allows hiring managers  to better understand potential candidates, while streamlining the process because they can test for specific skills, like time management, problem solving skills, or how well they will work in a team. Plus, candidates can be tested for on-the-job performance using simulations, which can help recruiters clearly see and understand how a candidate will behave and how capable they are. 

How to Introduce Gamification to the Recruitment Process

As with any new tool, gamification will need to be implemented slowly and carefully by the human resource management team. Before you apply gamification to every aspect of your recruitment process, you must be clear on what your goals are. Gamification elements should only be added to serve a purpose and they should also be clearly measurable so you can see where things are working, and where you might be wasting your resources. Here are a few tips to help you introduce gamification strategies to your recruitment process.

Plan ahead.

The planning process is a really important part of introducing gamification to your recruitment process. You should think about what type of game you want to introduce, or what type of game mechanic you want to introduce. Then, get clear on what your definition of success is when it comes to recruitment and how you can align that with a candidate’s job skills and knowledge needed. You should also think about how you will measure the results. 

Introduce gamification tools.

There are tonnes of gamification tools and strategies out there to help you begin to add gamification into your recruitment process. For example, 1Huddle can provide you with an online gamification platform where you can customize pre-made games on the application to reflect what your recruiting and onboarding goals are. 

Make the experience engaging.

Gaming should be something that’s fun and entertaining to participate in. On the other hand, taking aptitude or assessment tests are not. When you are introducing gaming to your recruitment process, make sure that users are having a good time using it. You can make sure you’re doing this by testing it out on your existing employees and asking them for user feedback. 

Always get user feedback.

Like we mentioned above, it can be useful, essential even, to get user feedback. a/B split testing, qualitative or quantitative surveys, whatever the method, you will need a way to capture data from users and use it as feedback to help you understand what you’re doing right and where you might be going wrong when it comes to user experience. If your user experience is not fun and engaging, then you will likely not end up with the outcomes and goals you were hoping for. 

Take note of your key metrics.

Keeping track of your recruitment metrics is very important, and adding in gamification elements will provide you with even more crucial metrics when it comes to your monthly reporting. Depending on your hiring goals, you will need to start understanding what the best metrics are for measuring your recruitment success.

Examples of Gamification in Recruitment

Here are some of the ways you can use gamification during your recruitment process. 

Leaderboards and dashboards.

Leaderboards and dashboards will come with premade goals and scoring metrics, which can help make identifying the best candidates much easier with the data at hand. They also allow you to keep track of the recruitment progress, recognize top performers, and can also help lead to healthy competition within your recruitment team. 

Puzzles.

Puzzles are highly effective gaming mechanics with very little overhead. They can help you get to know a candidate’s competencies quickly, and help cut through boredom and other testing procedures that can be more time-consuming. 

Rewards systems. 

If your company has a career webpage, then there is a good opportunity here for the use of gamification in recruitment. You can introduce reward points and badges for individual candidates who visit your site, share a comment, take a poll or give a rating for your company’s performance. 

You might even have a fun scavenger hunt based on your website to see if candidates have taken initiative and done some pre-interview research about your company. 

Progress charts in real-time. 

Another gamification element is using real-time progress charts throughout the candidate’s journey through the recruitment process. This way, candidates can keep track of where they stand on their path towards recruitment which can help them stay more engaged and enthusiastic about getting to the “final stage”.

The benefits and advantages of introducing gamification techniques to your recruitment process are many, but if you aren’t comfortable with gamifying the process from scratch, there are many ready-to-use tools such as 1Huddle which can help get you started off on the right foot.

At 1Huddle, we offer cloud-based employee gamification software that can easily adapt to any employee recruitment or gamification strategy you want to implement at your workplace. You can customize your content for a seamless experience and all of your employees will be able to access their training anywhere, anytime and at the push of a button. You can use our gamification platform to measure their performance and make key decisions on where you should take your gamification strategy next. 

Do you want to learn more about how 1Huddle can help you level up your workforce? Request a demo today.