When it comes to the end-to-end recruiting process there’s one piece of the candidate puzzle that continues to complicate things – the so-called ‘soft skills’. They’re about the candidate’s personality, their level of empathy, how well they work in a team environment, how adaptive they are, how well they respond under pressure and other profoundly human skills that have less to do with their strictly professional abilities and everything to do with the way they think, behave and read a situation. There’s just no good way to test for these outside of gamification, so frequently it comes down to the recruiter and their ‘gut feeling’.
Trying to understand such deeply embedded into who a candidate is as a person is borderlining on the impossible. Just like there’s no way to read a person in a 30 minute conversation, testing for profoundly human abilities is just not feasible when you’ve also got to make sure that you’ll get a candidate matching the company style, objectives and job requirements.
Which is why oftentimes this crucial part gets ignored.
So now ask yourself – can we do better? Is there a way in the recruitment industry to make sure that you’re truly getting the best of the best?
We wouldn’t be here if there weren’t. And you guessed it – gamification assessments are the answer.
The solution are AI-backed gamification-based recruitment platforms. It’s down to the winning combination of candidates having fun while completing assessments and the power of AI and advanced analytics that take those assessments and generate a complete picture of the candidate for recruiters to use going forward.
Pre-assessing candidates is a part of the recruitment process that we should try to help with an extra layer of intelligence in the industry – because it’s a complex, lengthy, messy process that can be easily automated. How, you’re asking?
Gamification-Based Recruitment Platforms
Let us just start by underlining that gamification is not just about ‘playing’. It’s about resonating with people on a very low note of our brains, which is our innate desire to turn every process (learning, applying for jobs) into a fun, challenging, desirable one.
The word gamified refers to the design and development features of the platform, not to the fact that most of the tests and assessments are styled to resemble video games as you might think at a first look. These are all-in-one recruiting solutions that combine the best of previous generations (job boards, private messaging, resume posting) with the best of the cutting-edge solutions that we’ve created to magnify impact (gamified assessments, AI-powered analysis).
The power lies in the holistic view of each candidate that recruiters can now receive in their inbox. This view will include hard skills and soft skills, of course, but it will also include an assessment of the candidate based on factors such as how their cover letter is worded, which academies they select to participate in, and many more.
Simulations Offer Soft Skills Assessments That Don’t Feel Like Tests
Bolding the second part. Being able to complete an assessment of any kind, as an adult, whether millennial or Gen-Z, without thinking you’re in the pits of despair, is an achievement in and of itself. Make assessments enjoyable and you’ve got yourself an engaged candidate looking forward to getting to work with you.
Designed using the principles of the gaming industry, these online stimulations feel more like a role-playing game than an actual job-related test. When it comes to gauging how someone will respond under pressure, say in a situation where their team is about to miss a major deadline and the client isn’t happy, simulations offer a new solution.
As a recruiter, you are often asked to fill hiring managers in on things like a candidate’s intent, empathy, how long they’ll stay at the company, and even emotional intelligence. These are difficult personality aspects and traits that even the most intuitive recruiter often misjudges.
Candidates are under a lot of stress during interviews and video screens, so much so that over 50% of the people in the current U.S. market said that changing jobs is one of the most stressful events of their lives. So normal responses are often blunted, hidden under their discomfort with panel interviews may be the most empathetic software developer you’ve never met. Online simulations are a great way to let that empathy shine by removing the stressful surroundings.
Academies Provide More Than Simple Skills Training
Academies are MOOC-like (massive open online courses) settings where candidates can opt to learn the skills that companies are looking for. Recruiters have the ability to upload these academies, so they know the candidates are getting the training hiring managers are looking for, and candidates know the skills they’re learning are in demand.
Structured online classes are an awesome, scalable way for recruiters to get a glimpse of traits like honesty, follow-through, and teamwork under pressure. With the power of advanced analytics and logs from in-class chat sessions to provide the data—it’s possible for the platform to collect more than enough information on a candidate to provide a full picture to the recruiters.
On top of all that, the academies can offer training in these very soft skills. Emotional intelligence, in particular, is becoming a highly sought after trait. Results from the academy’s final projects are then added to the candidate’s profile so the AI can parse them along with everything else known about each candidate.
Bonuses to Using a Gamified Platform in Testing Hard Skills
Advantage number 1: AI-Powered Scorecard
Aced the exam for their last academy? Now that score, along with the badge they earned, is added to their background scorecard. This is where the AI goodness begins, as the analysis engine that powers the platform takes these results and adds them to their existing scorecard with the results of all other academies, challenges, emotional intelligence assessments, and other soft skill assessment data to form a unified score. This is the score you will ultimately use to decide if they would make a good cultural fit for your company and if you want to continue discussions.
Advantage number 2: Find The Best Talent
It’s never been this easy for a recruiter to get this kind of comprehensive picture of a candidate. In the past, you had to read a resume, a cover letter, and references. Then you had to combine these with your personal impression, and only after all these came interview notes.
Now, your candidates’ skills are represented by more than just what they remember to include on their resumes, and their soft skills are more than what their former boss recalls about their performance. All so that you don’t have to rely on their own judgment to make the right call about their fit in the office culture.
Put it All Together: A Complete Candidate Picture
It’s once a person has been using the platform for a bit that the true power of AI shines through. Every badge they earn, every challenge (small situational assessments recruiters can post) they complete, and every academy project is added to the candidate’s profile. Then the analytics take over.
These advanced analytics look at these results, the person’s resume and cover letter (or profile summary), and run it all through the algorithms. What results is a profile that is easily searchable by recruiters and provides a comprehensive look at that candidate as a person. Their hard skills, soft skills, and even something about their personality and ability to thrive in different types of office culture – it’s all there.
But Gamified Recruiting Is Much More
Young talent can use academy projects as the foundation for a portfolio, mid-career professionals can get training in the latest technologies and soft skill fundamentals they might have missed the first time around, and you, as a recruiter, can find exactly who they’re looking for to fill even the trickiest niche position. That’s not all, there are additional benefits when it comes to soft skills specifically:
Benefits for Recruiters
- One-stop-shop for the best and brightest candidates. And those candidates will be awesome fits in your company culture because the AI already pared down the list before presenting them to you.
- Advanced analytics cut time to hire and eliminate the rote work of scanning resumes, etc. This leaves you more time to interact with those candidates deemed great fits to see if you agree with the AI, then pass them along to the hiring managers for interviews.
- Self-selecting an audience of high-quality candidates gives you a ready talent pool to draw from. And that pool will be full of people who you already know are great cultural fits, are ready to go with the skills they need, and are already up on cutting-edge tech since you found them on the latest and greatest gamified recruiting platform out there!
Eager to learn more about gamification? We’re here to chat.
