Article: How gamification solves recruitment challenges

Talent Acquisition

How gamification solves recruitment challenges

Gamification of the process creates time for the recruiter, organizes their tasks and deeply engages them in the creative steps of sourcing the best talent. To know more , read on..
How gamification solves recruitment challenges

Recruiting top talent is complex because it is an art as well as a science at the same time. Recruiters have the unique challenge to make their processes robust and rigorous like a branch of science; creative and innovative like a piece of art. They have to find the best talent each day and at a great speed; they need to keep pace with the business. With our economy growing fast, there is an undying demand for talent. Interestingly, the talent one looks for is always in short supply. 

When the Talent Acquisition specialist calls for applications, her email and phone remain abuzz with inquiries and interested candidates. But, most of these jobseekers are not good enough for the initial stage of screening. So, the recruiter has to find creative ways of preventing the incoming spam, getting rid of the junk and searching for the needle in a stack of hay.

Solves the problem of plenty

Gamification helps her achieve these seemingly tedious tasks. Technologists have been able to leverage the competitive spirit of human mind in recasting the recruiting process.

Normally a recruiting exercise comprises of various stages and involves significant amount of planning and communication. Gamification has converted the entire process into a series of small steps and is able to keep the applicants engaged with it. They go through the steps and the automated system keeps rewarding them at each stage of the process with scores and various awards. Given the pace of our living, we look for instant gratification. This tool meets this need neatly and hence, applicants love it.

Secondly, they tap into the competitive spirit of each person to make one compete against the other and bring out the best that a person has. They use scorecards, leader-boards and status scores etc to attract the participants to outdo the others.

Several organizations around the world have used these methods. This helps their recruiters in casting the net wide in the talent market and at the same time, filtering out the best applications through the multi-stage process. The time to recruit comes down and at the same time, candidates experience respect and dignity.

Helps the Recruiter orchestrate like a maestro

Recruiting function is successful when a number of things work in unison. The Talent Acquisition team needs to have the right intelligence about the talent market; they must be clear about the value proposition of the employer organization; should have understood the roles well enough to be able to attract the right candidate and so on till the candidate joins work. It is a long list of 12 steps in the process and there are multiple stakeholders through these steps. The recruiter keeps juggling between a bunch of tasks and a large number of candidates. It is difficult to stay focused on each of the assignments that she is working on. Most often, the assignments are in various stages of execution and she wades through her notes to execute all of them simultaneously. As a result, the success of recruiting function becomes a hostage of an individual’s ability to multi-task, hold a lot of information together and think creatively to spot talent and engage them. It boils down to a recruiter’s individual brilliance and determination to succeed.

Gamification of the process creates time for the recruiter, organizes her tasks better and engages her deeper in the creative steps of sourcing the best talent. Leader-boards, score cards, ranking methods and similar such tools motivate the top recruiters to go higher up the rank. Not only the good performers get better, the poor performers feel the pressure to either shape up or ship out.

Another important part of the strategy is to convert these scores into individual rewards and team recognition. That creates a positive environment within the organization, builds team spirit and channelizes the energies in the right way.

Helps find the Right Match

Recruiting is about finding establishing the match between the role on offer and the competencies of the candidate. They experience dissonance when they discover too many mismatches after the recruitment is done.

Gamification methods solve this problem to a large extent. The games are designed in such a way that the required competencies are tested in various stages of the process. Since the process is highly engaging in the form of a game and has multiple stages, it is not easy for a candidate to produce the most desirable response and manage impressions of the assessor. And in the same way, through various stages of the game, the candidate gets a fair idea about the role and its context. The potential employee and employer get to experience each other better in this method compared to the traditional methods; hence, a greater chance of finding the right-hire.

Gamification is still in the works and deployment is limited to a very small percentage of organizations in India. It is gaining popularity and in the next 2 years, we will see nearly one-third of the firms adopt this practice. There is no doubt that in the coming years, gamification will be indispensable and a keystone of HR strategy for India Inc. 

Read full story

Topics: Talent Acquisition, Recruitment

Did you find this story helpful?

Author

QUICK POLL

How do you envision AI transforming your work?