8 Ways to Gamify Your Recruitment Processes

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8 ways to Gamify Your Recruitment Processes By Tom Laine tomlaine.com [email protected] Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

Transcript of 8 Ways to Gamify Your Recruitment Processes

Page 1: 8 Ways to Gamify Your Recruitment Processes

8 ways to Gamify Your Recruitment Processes

By Tom Laine

tomlaine.com

[email protected]

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

Page 2: 8 Ways to Gamify Your Recruitment Processes

Gamification according to Wikipedia

Wikipedia: Gamification commonly employs game design elements which areused in so called non-game contexts in attempts to improve userengagement, organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing,employee recruitment and evaluation, ease of use and usefulness of systems,physical exercise, traffic violations, and voter apathy, among others. A reviewof research on gamification shows that a majority of studies on gamificationfind positive effects from gamification.

Gamification is not actual games, but use of game-like mechanics to activatepeople in various ways. The activation methods, triggers, could containvirtual or real life rewards, statuses, badges, levels, points, credits, “eastereggs” (special surprise rewards), vouchers, discounts, gift cards, or evenconcrete prizes.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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The one thing in common with all gamification cases is Engagement. Itjust varies who's being engaged, for what, and especially how.

The gamification of recruitment and HR processes has been afrequently discussed topic at various HR forums for a few years now.Only a few people really seem to understand what the gamificationmethods are or what the benefits may be.

Here's my take on the topic!

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Gamifying the recruitment process falls in my book into 8 main categories - the what and why

Category 1.

What?

Activate employees to share recruitment ads and employer brandingcontent

Why?

Company personnel has on average 6 times the network reach thecompany has. Personnel is also the most trustworthy advocate acompany can have

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Gamifying the recruitment process falls in my book into 8 main categories - the what and why

Category 2.

What?

Activate personnel to give referrals, point us to the right direction, whoare the most interesting individuals in their networks we shouldconsider hiring

Why?

To hire the best of the best and better cultural matches, people who fitin the team.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Gamifying the recruitment process falls in my book into 8 main categories - the what and why

Category 3.

What?

Activate our fans, friends and followers or even the applicants to shareour content in their networks

Why?

To gain awareness and for brand building purposes, sometimes justplain ol' marketing

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Gamifying the recruitment process falls in my book into 8 main categories - the what and why

Category 4.

What?

Activate the top specialists out there to apply with us

Why?

You want to attract the best individuals, not just anyone unemployeddesperate for a job

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Gamifying the recruitment process falls in my book into 8 main categories - the what and why

Category 5.What?To educate the applicants about us. Give the applicants a possibility tounderstand better our organisation, the company culture, our values, the jobcontent, methods, tools & technologies, etc., in order to make betterdecisions whether to apply with us or not.

Why?To avoid cultural mismatches. In short, it's transparency, and that's the nameof the game these days. The applicants will search for information about youand how you treat your employees and a number of other things - whetheryou want it or not.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Gamifying the recruitment process falls in my book into 8 main categories - the what and why

Category 6.

What?

Test the potential candidates if they have what it takes to work with us(while helping to understand the working environment, and more).

Why?

You want to test the applicants as well as possible before making thedecision. Firing is often more difficult than hiring.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Gamifying the recruitment process falls in my book into 8 main categories - the what and why

Category 7.

What?

Educate the potential candidates how to apply better

Why?

To make candidates more comparable with each other and to guidethem to apply in the right way through the right channel with the rightkind of application. Of course you'll be able to spot the best ones moreeasily if they know what you're really looking for and how the processworks.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Gamifying the recruitment process falls in my book into 8 main categories - the what and why

Category 8.

What?

For simply marketing purposes, to build employer brand or to gainmedia exposure with no greater cause or agenda behind it

Why?

What is the purpose or marketing or employer branding…

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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The "what and why" are easy to understand, but "how" is much moredifficult. Gladly we have some great examples from around the worldavailable.

Many of the following examples don't fall into just one category, buthave elements where actual tests or application processes work well asmarketing and branding campaigns as well. There are interestingcombinations in play, see what you could learn from these examples.

Enjoy!

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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The Idols and Apprentice models

A number of organisations have done Idols-type of auditionings, wherepeople get to "audition" live in front of the recruitment team. In somecases there have been great amounts of people who have gathered toaudition for a job, and sometimes even chaos when there have beenmore applicants than what the company can handle.

The airline company Finnair had a "service angels" auditioning, an openevent for applicants to come for these speed-date interviews, andhundreds of people came over. Not all wanted to wait for their turn,while there was a queue hundreds of meters long, and some of theapplicants started complaining about the queues in Facebook. Notgood.

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Vila, a clothing company, organized a live auditioning to quickly gothrough the applicants when looking for sales personnel for theirclothing store. 136 people showed up, quickly auditioned, and a smallnumber progressed to a more in-depth interview. The company waslooking for people with certain attitude, and surely style, oral skills andlooks must have played a role in the process as well, even if not openlyadmitted. 4 people were hired, but they failed to find a Shop Managerwith this method and relied on more traditional recruitment for thisposition.

The skillset in both of these cases was fairly simple and the weight wason finding people with the right attitude and "appearance" more thancertain education or experience.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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A software company I know well, organized The Apprentice type ofrecruitment process to find a suitable person. They told the applicantsupfront that 3 people will get a short term "try-out" job contract toprove their skills while working, but only one of them would get apermanent contract after the initial try-out period. This allowed thecompany to test the applicants in real life situations and test thecultural fit as well as skills while all having to perform similar (or eventhe same) tasks. The process gave room for better evaluation of theapplicants as a whole. To lie or pretend in a short interview or two iseasy, to pretend everyday for a month is almost impossible.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Employee engagement

Employee engagement is one of the most hyped keywords these days in marketing,but now also in recruitment. And not just engagement of employees, but allrelevant stakeholders out there. How could we leverage people's networks, buildloyalty, enhance sales and marketing, collect product and service ideas, buildemployer brand, activate internal and external brand advocates, and in generaldrive customer-driven business development?

There are great tools for different types of engagement and community building.We could use Sprout's or Meltwater's tools, or services like Smarp or People2Join,or just ask our personnel what they'd be willing and interested in doing forcommon good. Would they share the recruitment ads to their networks, wouldthey be willing to tell their career story on a video, post a message to auser/developer group, or come and stand at our booth at a career fair?

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Especially the use of different technical tools is fast becoming popular, afterall, it's seems like it's easier to tell the people how to use a tool than changethe culture and mindset... Just saying!

In the best cases people are really committed to helping the company hirethe best people out there, people are proud of their employer and happywith their work, and share the content often even without asking. They wantto influence who's being hired. After all, nobody wants a colleague they haveto drag along.

The best want to work with the best, and for that purpose it's important togive our personnel a face and voice, to use them as our honeypot for evenbetter applicants. And in many cases our specialists know better than ourrecruitment team where to look for those passive candidates.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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The gamification part? To activate people you sometimes need tocreate small internal (or external) games, give prizes or keep aleaderboard. A small thing to do to get the vast networks our personnelhave, to work for the corporate good.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Actual games

America's Army is by farthe most famous of actualgames organisations havedeveloped (or at leastplanned and ordered) totell people what they do,how they do it, and insome cases even to testthe players' skills who's bethe best match of themall!

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Russian Army has had simpler games for the same purpose, and anumber of organisations have used small Facebook "games" to engagepeople and to educate them about our opportunities and what itrequires to apply with us and do well in certain positions. Someorganisations have done it for long and with great success, some havetried it out and given up.

Accenture, especially in the U.S., has used different Facebook games fora long time and with great results, while Marriott Hotels had greatplans which never were realized as the first game didn't work quite aswell or give the kind of results as planned.

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Shell has had some success withtheir browser game, the ShellExplorer Game, and it's gotsome really nice features in it.You don't even have to finish thegame to be able to apply or tounderstand what it's trying tosay. It gives nice insight intoShell's operations as such. Theonly problem I see with it is itbeing a browser game. So itneeds Internet connection and ittakes some time to load.

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With fairly little effort, a game can give great insight into what a personcan do or is interested in doing. It also builds nice engagement, and canexplain really nicely what is required to work at the company and atcertain positions.

Some of the organizations using actual games as part of theirrecruitment toolbox are e.g. Wells Fargo, WalMart, Medtronic, SAP, SunLife, T-Mobile, Dell, Hewlett Packard, McAfee, HBO Europe, Huawei,Booking.com, VMWare, Sabre, U.S. Foods, D4, International HotelsGroup and Anheuser-Busch.

Can you identify others?

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Online tests and challenges

Online skill and psychological tests are often boring and in many cases nonsense. I wouldn't trustmost of them. But using light and easy to use tests for activation and building engagement, sure, I'llbuy that.

One interesting example is ISS (the facility services company), who have used a Facebook test (theycall it a "game") to engage people to think about their career choices and what the company couldoffer them.

Fazer, a bakery / confectionary company, has used Zef's survey tool to build a career test, similarly toISS trying to activate people to think about their career choices and to activate them to apply withthe company.

Different technical solution, similar ideology and similar results. In fact, these tests don't produceany actual value to the user, only engage them to consider the organisation as a potential employer.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Some of the more complex testscould earlier be found at theAccenture U.S. Facebook page, butfor some reason they are notavailable anymore. Same withMarriott's Facebook game thateducated about their jobs andactivated people to apply.

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Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Educating the applicants

Like with Marriott's Facebook game and Shell's browser gameexamples, the point in many of these efforts is in educating applicantswhat it would be like and what it requires to apply with and work forthe company and at certain positions.

There are great examples available, like PricewaterhouseCoopersHungary’s 12-day Facebook game Multipoly, New Zealand's Air Force,and L'Oreal's career app “game”. They work very differently, but try toachieve the same result; to explain about different jobs and context,what happens within the company.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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New Zealand's Air Force wantsyou to understand all aspects ofbecoming an employee. The rolesavailable, salary level, typicaleducational background, duties,and more. The gamification inthis case is how the roles areshowcased and explained. Checkthis out, a simple but veryeffective and useful one.

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At L'Oreal's mobile app gameyou get to choose a field ofinterest, and you're then guided(with a character) to makedecisions like you were workingwith the company. And at theend, of course, you're activatedto apply with L'Oreal now thatyou've proved yourself worthyand stated interest.

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French Postal serviceFormaposte explains anormal working weekof a postman, with anactual game. All theway from takingmorning showers tomaking decisionsregarding the delivery.

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Social activity and skills testing hand-in-hand

Some of the games and gamified content activate people to like, shareor comment recruitment ads or employer branding content. Some aremore focused on actually testing people or at least showing what thejob is all about. Often while activating people to share the content.

Next you’ll see some interesting examples, but remember to also checkout Indian TechGig’s coding challenges, Techniqueen.at’s challenges,IGN’s Code-Foo challenges, and Google’s Code Jam sessions.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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How would Enterasys’ jobapplication process sound toyou, would you apply or evenbe eligible to apply?

…need to apply via Twitter withcertain hashtag, have morethan 1000 Twitter followers,need to have the socialinfluence score Klout above 60and similar Kred score over 725(High!), and they willcrowdsource Twitter for publicendorsements!

So you need to prove that youare an influencal communicatorin real life to be able to evenapply.

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You may have heard about probably the mostextraordinary recruitment case ever, at least theone that has gained most media exposure. W+K'ssocial media challenge for their Old Spice account.

Wieden+Kennedy (W+K, the Old Spice's designatedadvertising partner) asked applicants to createsocial media content to 10 different media, usingtheir skills and networks to show they have theunderstanding of these media at a level creativeenough for W+K to even consider them. Here arethe 10 categories of which at least one wasrequired, and all without explaining to anyone thatthis content is related to a job application.

Pretty crazy requirements, right?

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Arla's #socialhunting case is one of the mostinteresting ones. Arla was looking for a MarketingAssistant, and wanted not just to test their skills, butuse their skills to do promotion for Arla at the sametime.

Candidates needed to create a max. 30 second videoof themselves, explaining why they love Arla and whythey would be the perfect match for the MarketingAssistant job. And to prove their skills, they needed tospread the video across social media with thehashtag #socialhunting.

Arla promised that the applicants with most views,likes and shares would automatically get to theinterview stage, and they would then additionallypick a couple of applicants they liked best based onactual skillset and content.

Unfortunately it's not public information whether oneof the "audience favorites" or staff picks got the job...Anyway, a great amount of visibility for the company,explaining in so many ways why people want to workfor Arla and how they appreciate the company.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Domino’s Pizza has a great tablet app game, where you need to first learn to make a round pizza. If it’s notround enough or the right size, you can’t progress. Once you pass, you then need to spread the tomatosauce. If you pass, you get to add toppings, then use just the right amount of cheese spread evenly on top ofthe pizza. Then the pizza needs to be cooked properly. Only after all levels passed, you are ready to applywith Domino’s. Fail? No application, please!

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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With the recruitment agencyHays things are quite simple.Look through a few interviewvideos and decide who's thebest candidate, and apply tobecome a recruiter!

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Australian Air Force isone of many defenseorganizations usinggamification methodsto activate potentialcandidates and to testthem.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Here's the Britishintelligence agencyMI5's gamified test forfuture surveillanceofficers.

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For actual testing ofcandidates, someorganizations make theapplications not justfunny, but difficult topass. If you can't crackthe code, don't applywith the Britishintelligence agencyGCHQ...

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Qvik is not as strict asGCHQ where youhave to really passthe test in order toapply. With Qvik youcan just play thepuzzle and they'lldecide whether theywant to interview youor not.

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Sometimesthings don'tgo quite asplanned,thou...

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Ernst & Young takes testingseriously. They have createdseveral different logic gamesto test your ability solveproblems. And some of thegames aren't easy, far fromit!

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Referrals, incentives and bonuses

The use of employee engagement tools like Smarp is becoming popular.There are both upsides and downsides with technical tools, butproperly used they can help the organization reach out to greateraudiences than with just about any other means. If you can activateyour personnel, not to talk about their networks, to spread the wordfor you, that's worth a looooot of money.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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These tools are built to activatethe users with a number ofgamification methods, such asgiving them credits or points,statuses and badges, they haveleaderboards, and even actualconcrete real-life prizes for themost active users!

Here’s one job ad distributed toFacebook with Smarp'sSmarpShare tool, by an employeeof Borenius Attorneys.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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LinkedIn has recently published 2interesting mobile apps to supportthis kind of behavior; Elevate andReferrals. Elevate is an employeeengagement app, available fororganizations with 500+ people atLinkedIn, whereas Referralsengages employees to share yourrecruitment ads and refer peoplefrom their personal networkstowards the recruiter. Elevate isavailable already, but Referrals isavailable just for a very smallgroup of U.S. based bluechips fornow.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Funny little things

The gamification could happen just about anywhere, proves Spotify.Here's a funny little thing one of their recruiters did to find interestingpeople from all over the world. And all tailored to You, individually, andusing their own platform. Pure genius!

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Did you see it? If not, go back and read the song names! Nice touch! A headhunting outreach as a Spotify playlist!

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Jaguar Land Rover doesn’t use quite as much effort as Spotify, but theydon’t fall short much. Here’s what they do at Instagram with pictures andclever short videos. Do the tasks seem easy?

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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How would you feel about using max. 140characters and having to post your job adwithout words, using only emojis/emoticons?

Well, L’Oreal’s done just that! And of course,some smartass applicants have applied usingonly emojis… Good luck identifying the bestcandidates!

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Sometimes the effort is not that small, like with Heineken’s new campaign ”Heineken Go Places”, where theyhave built a webtest that guides you based on your own interests through their portfolio of products, businessareas, and more, in an engaging, funny way. Check this out, here are only a few steps along the long way ofgoing through the video-driven engagement process! The process functions also as a sort of a personality test.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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What recruiters first, candidates second

We've seen the number of gamified job applications, creativeapplication methods and funny availability announcements from allover the world during the past few years. If recruiters find a new tool topost job ads at or network or build employer brand, you can be sure afew job applicants will do the same their own way, trying to enhancetheir possibilities of being found at these same tools and media. Here'sa couple of the most interesting examples.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Nina really wanted to work with AirBnB, so she created a website with content looking like AirBnB and abouthow AirBnB could benefit from her knowledge of certain markets. And started attracting attention to herwebsite in hopes for AirBnB to notice her effort.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Robby Leonardi wanted to find an interesting new job, but wasn’t sure what theperfect job would be, so he put his skills and expertise in play to receive job offersand to see what the world has to offer. And the world noticed Robby…

To progress in the game, you needed to run your character thru a few levels, allexplaining different sides of Robby’s skills, interest, achievements, and more.

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Robby got plenty of job offers from all over theworld, and Baidu even copied Robby’scharacter without permission for it’s own use,but Robby didn’t get that one magic job offerhe was looking for. And the search continues…

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Sami managed to identify the job he’d always dreamed of. But how to get noticed andconvince he was what the company was looking for…? Sami put in some extra effort andmade a campaign out of his application process, explaining it all in a YouTube video.

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Going too far? Possibly. Scary? Yeah, a bit. Going the extra mile? Sure, if this doesn’tconvince the hiring manager that this guy is serious about his application and motivated,nothing does.

Got other great examples in mind? Share it!

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com

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Want to know and learn more about how to gamify yourrecruitment processes? Join one of my social media

recruitment trainings or watch my training videos(available Autumn 2016)

Want to know more about me? http://www.tomlaine.com/Want fo befriend me at LinkedIn? https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomlaine

Want to book a training or consultation? [email protected]

Copyright 2016 Tom Laine, tomlaine.com