Karen Dikson — June 26, 2017 Gamification is a pretty popular word nowadays. Lots of people use it, but actually few understand how gamified strategies could be beneficial to many business areas. Yet, you must understand that gamification exists for a long time, and it has been applied and it is applied on a constant basis.
In order to understand what I’m talking about, here’s what you might not know: Referrals (any type of referrals be it commissions, discounts, and so on) are basically a part of a gamification process. You are being drawn into a game which constantly rewards you for accomplishing different tasks.
There are more examples that might be just under your nose every day without you noticing them and recognizing them as gamified experiences that make you more motivated, involved, or interested in a product or service.
Without a doubt, gamification develops the quality of many fields of activity, and it’s not so difficult to notice that the recruitment sector is one of the environments that can be improved through the use of these innovative gamified strategies.
Gamification as a Recruitment Tool
Gamification helps with drawing the attention of potential employees towards a company by developing innovative ways of creating challenges that are masked under the concept of a game. Big companies gamify the recruitment experience using the online environment and college campuses from all around the world.
Recruitment managers can construct “games” that trigger different situations which can make the applicant show off his personality traits and potential talents. Finding these soft skills would be difficult be difficult unless the one who is drawn into the process has a competitive personality. Again, another trait that can make the difference between winners and losers.
How to Implement Gamification in Your Recruitment Process
The implementation of this concept to your own business would be a smart action in case your “target employees” are predisposed to be interested in attending your gamified strategies. More than often, Millennials or the Z Generation are better fits for such innovative movements. Therefore, the persona you’re targeting is a college grad who’s looking to showcase his talents.
However, the success rate of a recruitment campaign that works under gamification principles depends on the design of the games. By design, I’m not referring to the visual design, but more to the metrics that allow the recruiter to carefully examine the talents and personality traits of the person who went through the game.
Gamification can sometimes be expensive. Hiring professionals that can craft and optimize gamified strategies are not cheap at all. The investment cost could range from $ 2.000 to millions. Allow me to assume that your budget isn’t 2 million dollars, and let present you a few alternatives.
1. Virtual job fairs
You can find plenty of tools on the web that will allow you to initiate a virtual job fair that will allow you to share enough information about your available positions. Through these fairs, you can attract employees and even test their qualifications through different tasks.
2. Interesting Surveys
Develop surveys that address out-of-the-box questions. Promise rewards in exchange for full involvement in the surveying process. With these surveys, you will capture the applicant’s attention and you’ll generate a lot of clues about his qualities.
3. Puzzles & Tests
Here’s another inexpensive strategy that helps you find out more about your job applicants. You can find various tests and puzzles online, and have your potential employees complete them before receiving an interview. This will obviously motivate them to show off their born intelligence, so only good will come out of simple gamified strategy.
Now here are some insights to help you start off with your own gamification process, which can be unique and never tested before.
Explain the Process Well
First of all, you need to let your applicants know what they’re expected to do. You need to simply explain the rules of the game, the rewards that are expected (it could be winning a position or gaining a recommendation), and the criteria for signing in. Make your “game” easy to understand and you’ll get more results.
Focus on Engagement
A good strategy to engage talented college grads is to show them their real-time progress. This can be done through progress bars of mini-achievements that lead to bigger ones. People need to see progress in order to be motivated to go on and become even better.
Offer Rewards
Oh, the rewards. Everyone loves them. If you are aware of how your dopamine system works, you should already know that rewards release dopamine in our brains. Dopamine is the primary “food” for our motivation and happiness. This particular gamification strategy is used a lot in today’s job marketplace and not only.
Gamification really is a strategy that’s worth trying. Keep in mind that in order to reach the results you’re expecting, you must first test and see whatever works for your company and your company only. In less than a few years, gamification will be implemented by more and more companies because of a simple reason: technology keeps advancing and people never cease to bring new innovative elements into the world.
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