Use fun and gamification in selection, not just attraction, says Chemistry

Gamification should be bought into the heart of recruitment and used as selection tools, not just left as “trivial” branding elements for the front end of a hiring process, according to a people management and technology consultant.
Mon, 1 Jul 2013
Gamification should be bought into the heart of recruitment and used as selection tools, not just left as “trivial” branding elements for the front end of a hiring process, according to a people management and technology consultant.
Gamification should be bought into the heart of recruitment and used as selection tools, not just left as “trivial” branding elements for the front end of a hiring process, according to a people management and technology consultant.

Gareth Jones, a partner at behaviour change consultancy Chemistry Group, was speaking at last month’s CIPD Recruitment Conference, and noted that “gamification or game mechanics are not new, they’re in our everyday lives. We’ve just not talked about them much”.

Gamification is putting aspects of games and elements from game design into non-gaming situations to engage users, customers or clients. During his talk, Jones outlined a ‘game’ used by O2 in its recruitment process. Would-be candidates could only apply for jobs if they had given suitable responses to questions posed in the role-playing game, which identified values and motivations.

“Most of them [examples of gamification] are in the attraction space, very few of them are in selection and we believe they should be used in selection,” he said.

He added: “Games and assessments are not trivial and my view is they need to be positioned as selection tools and not at the front end as attraction tools.”
In the O2 example, people cannot complete their application for a job if they fail the game element of the application. He acknowledged that candidates could of course simply re-register with a new email, admitting: “You can’t stop people gaming the system… but the numbers who do it are tiny.”

Jones said that across the recruitment and talent space, “the technology that we’ve got that we’re not using is just phenomenal”, although earlier this year, one judge at the Recruiter Awards, sponsored by Eploy, suggested understanding of such future-minded concepts was clearly on the rise.

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