Attracting top talent - especially younger candidates – remains a challenge for companies, while first-time job hunters may not know how their skills apply.

Gamification enables employers to attract younger and more diverse candidates with memorable recruitment experiences while allowing candidates to gain insight into how they might fit into a potential role.

Evaluating for skills and fit

95% of employees in the USA actively seek work experience incorporating gamification, and the process can boost employee engagement by up to 48%. Gamification isn’t ‘playing games’ – it’s adding an element of reward for solving problems, which many would argue is what employment boils down to in the first place. While gamification can help engage prospective employees, it also allows organisations to gain practical data that help them make informed hiring decisions within the framework of a unique experience that boosts their brand – whether or not the candidate is hired. 

ManpowerGroup’s fun interactive assessment tool, Game-to-Work, enhances the overall candidate experience, helping companies engage with job seekers who may have a difficult job search due to a lack of experience or struggle to stand out in the applicant pool. It can help candidates demonstrate vital workplace skills such as critical thinking and complex problem-solving, which can be acquired through recreational gaming. Gaming also cultivates competencies like creativity and emotional intelligence that increase in value as AI learns to perform routine tasks. 

Looking beyond age and experience

Magyar Telekom in Hungary used gamification to attract millennials and candidates with limited work experience for sales roles. These candidates usually don’t have much experience, so their resumes couldn’t showcase their abilities. By removing resumes as a screening factor using Benchmark Games, Telekom evaluated candidates’ competencies such as goal orientation, endurance and problem-solving skills – a great way of solving the chicken vs egg scenario of needing experience to gain work but being unable to gain experience unless you’re able to work.

Game-to-Work similarly tapped into younger gamers with a Gaming Skills Translator that enables candidates to enter the specific games they play, their experience and skill level and the amount of time they spend gaming. It then translates the data into workplace skills that applicants can add to their resumes, helping them understand how their skills translate into real-world career paths.

Fostering continuous learning

An individual’s learning quotient (LQ) helps determine their workplace success over time, and gaming allows the brain to create better cognitive models, making it easier to predict and react to new situations. Assessments like ManpowerGroup’s Learnability Quotient (LQ) help people identify their learning style and offers feedback on how to keep developing their skills and employability.

Gaming fosters continuous learning skills, and adapting one’s skill set is increasingly critical as people adjust to the ever-changing work landscape. When work is gamified, as many as 89% of employees experience heightened motivation. Employees who undergo non-gamified training experience higher levels of unproductivity (12%) than those who receive gamified training (3%).

Creating more engaging assessments

Like Google’s famous billboard mathematical riddle, gamification demonstrated that appealing gaming techniques to assess talent can reap significant rewards. Aside from attracting candidates using creative content, gamification also gives organisations quantifiable data that helps them identify talent well-suited to the organisation in a way that a job interview can’t. 

Platforms like SkillsInSight engage candidates with short cognitive games that helps determine likeability, ability and drive, providing immediate feedback that supports talent decisions and aligns capabilities and potential for filling a company’s gaps. These data-based insights can help provide workplace advice for talent and indicate a good match for employers.

Online tools like Game to Work and SkillsInSight offer a fun way to put individuals at ease, ultimately making for a more accurate assessment of their potential fit for an employer. Enthusiastic and skilled gamers have developed a broad set of skills needed to thrive, including communication, reasoning, and collaboration. These soft skills are just as crucial as quantifiable skills typically learned in the classroom, such as mathematics, literacy and computer proficiencies. 

Your exercise behaviour is already gamified – and now gamification may solve your next recruitment challenge.