We have already discussed how gamification can help the HR department during a Development Centre, but now let’s focus on the recruitment duties. Recruitment is evolving from interviews and group discussions to a process of using game mechanisms that make the entire process engaging and fun, while helping employers find the right candidate for the specific jobs.

The IT sector have started using coding marathons, hacking events, complex time-pressured problem solving and cryptic puzzles during their recruitment process. These tools help the company assess the candidate’s engagement levels, competitiveness, work quality under pressure and thinking methods – are they creative and do they think outside the box?

Gamification is not a new concept, although it has only gained popularity in the last decade or so. At first it was being used widely in marketing and brand building, but companies soon began looking at this as a method to identify engagement levels of employees. Experts say that gamification is widely used in the IT and hospitality sector, but it can be easily adopted and embraced in other sectors as well. Gamification can be used to assess training needs of employees, or to better understand each employee’s skills and capabilities, which makes it better to make use of their talents.

Gamification techniques are using the competitive spirit of the candidates, and makes them compete against each other in a fun and engaging environment. This way the employer can select the best candidate in an objective and transparent way. Apart from being more engaging than traditional recruitment processes, using gamification also makes the whole process faster – the results are often declared right after this stage of recruitment is finished. According to experts, “gamification” is something more and more companies will move to in the following years in order to enhance engagement, training, recruitment and development.

Take a look at an example case study of using games in the HR department to assess the development needs of company management:

SimTeam - Case Study: Using SimTeam for a Development Centre of 300+ managers

Keywords: human resources, recruitment, gamification, assessment centre, development centre, business simulation, case study, gamified HR

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