Playing To A Digital Gallery: How Gamifying The Recruitment Process Can Help Companies Hire The Best Technical Talent

The battle for market share between companies today is a particularly high stake one, and its outcome will depend largely on which organisations have the best talent. Having skilled employees can not only drive productivity and help organisations in navigating extant business challenges, but also pave the way for future growth. The importance of acquiring quality talent and retaining it in the long-term, however, is something that most companies often overlook.

In today’s digital age, the skills required of candidates are vastly different from what the benchmark was five years ago, especially in fast-growing sectors like IT and finance. Traditional recruitment methods can no longer help HR managers and recruiters accurately assess a candidate’s technical skills.

What they need, in such a scenario, is to make the hiring process more efficient through engaging recruitment tests and assessments.

Game on: Why Gamification Is The Future Of Hiring

Gamified recruitment assessment software offers a highly accurate analysis of a candidate’s overall personality by incorporating psychometrics and machine learning.

Game-based recruitment solutions can help organisations assess a candidate’s various mental and intellectual capabilities such as problem-solving skills, critical thinking, verbal communication skills, etc. These solutions aid recruiters in understanding a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses through scientific methods, rather than gauging them from what is presented on a resume.

Candidates also benefit from such methodologies, as they are allowed to be their authentic selves and can easily apply the skills and qualities they possess to practical situations.

Hiring good coders, for instance, is quite difficult, a fact many recruiters would confirm. According to a report by Deloitte, 85% of the candidates applying for the position of a developer drop out during the recruitment process and only 3% end up getting hired. Consequently, many companies end up spending huge sums of money trying to hire candidates that are not fit for the job role.

Recruitment and assessment tools can help eliminate the limitations faced by hiring managers in this regard by assessing whether the candidate has the right skills for coding jobs. Moreover, those companies who find it difficult to reach candidates through traditional channels can conveniently ask them to log into web or mobile applications. By subjecting each candidate to a comprehensive game-based assessment, they can handpick candidates with the best scores and shortlist them for interviews.

Hackathons are also an engaging and effective way for tech companies to get several potential candidates under one roof and find the best from among them. Google, for instance, has been organising Google Code Jam, an international programming and software-writing competition, for the past 15 years as a means to identify, and subsequently hire, top engineering talent. Coding simulations and hackathons have proven to be quite effective, even for companies that are not Google, in finding the right talent and approaching them to fill open job roles.

While these methods can help companies project themselves as new-age employers among young candidates, they can also substantially reduce the capital and time they spent on traditional recruitment campaigns.

Companies today possess immense opportunity to build a robust and skilled team of employees that can enhance efficiency and productivity, as well as drive long-term, sustainable growth in the market. As most companies today are targeting millennials to fill various job roles, they need to speak the same language as this highly technology-savvy demographic.

The recruitment strategies that employers use should, therefore, be agile and technology-driven in order to motivate and attract talented candidates, and gamification could be just the “game-changer” the industry has been looking for.