Gamification – A Potent Tool In Recruitment
We all remember our childhood fondly, and the most memorable memories from childhood are of the hours spent playing various indoor and outdoor games with our friends. But apart from happy memories, the games children play with their friends have several benefits as well.
Those benefits of games and sports are now being used by companies in a variety of industries for external as well as internal benefits – externally to attract clients and customers, and internally to keep employees motivated and engaged. Gamification in custom software solutions is helping companies in several spheres of activities. Recruitment, for example, is one area where several companies have been using gamification to encourage the right candidates to apply. Let us look at five examples of this.
1.Dominoes : The global pizza chain has designed an app called Pizza Mogul where users are invited to come up with ideas for pizzas and toppings, and provide names to them. If that name is used by Dominoes, then every product sold under that name will have a financial reward for the contestant. This is a fun way of letting potential applicants know about the company and its products, and start contributing to the success of the company.
2.Google : the technology giant has been using a tournament setup for more than a decade to spot talented techies to hire. The Code Jam they host not only has cash rewards for the best coders, but the competitors who do well in this are also identified for future recruitment into Google.
3Formapost : The French postal service has designed a game which invites participants and potential applicants to spend a week living the life of a postal carrier of Formapost. The participants need to do everything that an employee does, but only in the game, from reporting to work early, learning to sort mail, go out on deliveries, learn about work ethics etc. This helps set up the right expectations in the minds of new joinees, and work frustrations and therefore employee turnover get reduced significantly.
4.GCHQ : This is the British security and intelligence agency (Government Communications HeadQuarters) which introduced a custom software on its website where applicants need to crack a code and find out the secret message before they could progress to the next round. This is a fun way to gauge the aptitude of applicants without making them go through interviews and written tests. The applicant also got a feel of whether he would be able to face the challenge of the job.
5.Umbel : This is a startup working in the area of Big Data, and has set up a competition on the lines of Code Jam (of Google) where opponents compete against each other by writing relevant code and are awarded points for things done right. The competitive spirit of participants also gets tested along with their technical prowess.
Gamification is therefore just not a tool for fun and games. As we saw with the example of recruitment, companies can use gamification in custom software solutions to achieve several of their corporate goals without coming across as theoretical and boring.