How to Use Gamification in Recruitment to Secure Top Candidates

Gamification involves using elements of games like point scoring, rules, problem solving and engaging stimuli with a set of objectives in mind, whether those be milestones or achievements.
In the case of internal hiring teams, using gamification is often a tactic used to:● Motivate high performance: Games have been proven to satisfy fundamental human desires like need for achievement, reward and recognition. ● Increase quality of performance: There’s a reason for the common phrase “stepping up your game.” Games often contain rules or elements that encourage participants to perform in an improved way.● Increase job satisfaction: Gamified processes usually involve an element of fun, which can make work more enjoyable. ● Increase engagement: Digitally-based games often use tactics to keep players engaged, such as daily reminders, live leaderboards, achievement badges and time constrained challenges.

1. Understand (or Establish) Your Key Recruitment Metrics

By this point, you might be starting to feel serious about what gamification can do for your recruitment team.

That’s great! The first thing you can do is determine what type of results you want to see more of, or even those you want less of.

Some common performance metrics we hear are important to recruitment teams include:
● Number of leads secured
● Number of candidates phone screened
● Number of open roles managed
● Number of offer acceptances

Try to avoid measuring your team on variables they lack control over, so the game remains fair. Some variables that you’d be best to consider excluding, include:
● Number of job applications: This is more to do with how appealing the job looks, not the person who posted it.● Number of times job descriptions are viewed: Again, this is largely out of the recruiter’s control. ● Number of interviews set up: Sometimes recruiters may get a great pool of applicants who move through to the interview stage, and in other cases it may only be a few who are suitable to make it to this stage, which is why we recommend leaving this off your list.
Once you’ve got your metrics, you’re ready to build a game around them.

Now that you’ve figured out what performance metrics you want to measure, it’s time to translate them into a game that gets your hiring team motivated to succeed. In order to do that, there’s a few things you need to consider.

Ah-ha - it’s not much of a game without rules. In order to ensure you are treating all participants fairly, it is good to lay the groundwork.

Some rule factors to consider include:
● Time: Is there a timeframe the game runs for? Are there only certain times when points can be scored?
● Scoring: How will you determine winners? What type of point scoring system will you use?
● Value of actions: Will there be a difference in the number of points awarded for each metric you’re measuring - i.e. is completing a phone screening worth more points than emailing a potential candidate?

Games are meant to be, well, fun. So it's important to think about how you can get the best performance out of your time by making the game enjoyable and with real stakes.

Engagement will depend on a number of factors from having desirable (and clearly defined) rewards, to tracking progress and having methods in place to remind your team to keep accumulating points.

Some gamification ideas to create an engaging challenge include:
● Daily notifications to remind players to keep scoring points● Sending players words of encouragement ● Hanging a poster up in the office with the rules of the game, and the prizes up for grabs. ● Creating a countdown so everyone can see how long they have left to score points ● Creating a leaderboard so everyone can track each other’s progress

We hardly need to say more here. Having some attractive prizes for your winners is an easy way to get your team to give the game their best shot.
But prizes don’t need to be physical or monetary. They could involve something more meaningful to your team, such as recognition or the chance to shadow an executive in your organisation for a day - get creative. Maybe you can have the winner’s names displayed on a whiteboard in your office’s kitchen for a month as one of the prizes!

While it is possible to develop and run a game using only an Excel spreadsheet and a few well-timed team emails, it can be a lot more engaging to use tools that help the game stay top-of-mind for players.

If points are collected on a shared spreadsheet, it’s not exactly…inspiring. Plus, who’s going to remember to check that every day?

In the next section, we cover some of the great tools out there that you might want to use to run your game and maximise your chances of seeing the best performance from your recruitment team.

Read our article "Real estate leaderboard and how to use gamification in the real estate industry".

There are a number of apps out there that allow you to schedule messages or notifications to send to your team.

In the case of your challenge, you may want to set up daily reminders to send out to your players and also reminders at specific time points across the challenge to remind your team how much time they have left to score points.

A great way to socially motivate your team is by setting up a scoreboard where everyone can keep track of each other’s progress. Leaderboards offer recognition to top performers and visualise scores in a way that’s far more interesting than a basic spreadsheet.
A great way to socially motivate your team is by setting up a scoreboard where everyone can keep track of each other’s progress. Leaderboards offer recognition to top performers and visualize scores in a way that’s far more interesting than a basic spreadsheet. metrics you want to score them on. Then you can download our scoreboard maker add-on from Google Marketplace. In just a few clicks, you can turn your spreadsheet into a leaderboard with your own branding and colors.

We hope this article has been useful for helping you plan and set up a gamified challenge for your recruitment team.

If you’d like to find out more about our online leaderboard maker, and to download it for free, you can visit the Google Marketplace. It takes less than 5 mins to set up.