Remember the last certification exam you took? That feeling of accomplishment, the sense of pride in a job well done, and the knowledge that your employer would look positively on you for taking the initiative to improve your work skillset? Not to mention the swag you got from the testing platform.
No? Not quite how you remember it?
Welcome to 2021, the year of gamified assessment and recruiting platforms. Now, when you take a hard skills assessment, you’ll be able to see clearly how it will aid in your career goals, moving you closer to landing your dream job.
It’s not that the test itself will be a game, mind you. There’s only so much magic that can be worked on testing for coding ability after all. We’re talking about what happens after you pass that exam since that’s where these platforms truly come into their own.
Your exam score is combined with those from other exams you’ve taken, the results of challenges you’ve completed, the badges you’ve earned, and the results of the soft skill assessments you’ve carried out. Then AI works it’s algorithmic magic and voile! Recruiters get a much more comprehensive and complete picture of who you are and what you bring to the table.
Bonuses to Using a Gamified Platform in Testing Hard Skills
In the past, when you passed a certification or boot camp exam, you got a certificate and the reassurance of knowing that you truly know your stuff. But how did you convey that information to the recruiters you were working with? If you were lucky and picked the right program, you got a digital badge or picture of some sort that you could put on your resume.
Gamified platforms integrate a far more robust system. Every time you complete an academy exam, you get another badge added to your profile. Now, not only are you assured of having the knowledge employers are seeking (since they’re the ones who post the academies), but your profile is automatically visible to all recruiters on the platform, so they know it too. Turning skills you know are in demand into progress toward landing your ideal position has never been easier!
Gamified Platform Advantage #1: AI-Powered Scorecard
Ace the exam for your last academy? Good on ya! Now that score, along with the badge you earned, is added to your background scorecard. This is where the AI goodness begins, as the analysis engine that powers the platform takes these results and adds them to your existing scorecard with the results of your other academies, challenges, emotional intelligence assessments, and other soft skill assessment results to form a unified score. This is the score recruiters will ultimately use to decide if you would make a good cultural fit for their company and if they want to continue discussions.
Gamified platform Advantage #2: Present Your Best, Most Well-Rounded self
Taking that scorecard and moving forward means you’re presenting a well-rounded picture of yourself to the recruiters you’re working with. By including hard skills exams, soft skills assessments, and even the results of office scenarios and other simulations you can participate in, gamified recruitment platforms present you as a total package.
It’s never been this easy for a recruiter to get this kind of comprehensive picture of a candidate. In the past, they had to read your resume, cover letter, and references. Then they had to combine these with their personal impression from your phone screen, and if you were lucky enough to make it past that, the notes from your interviewer. And then, finally, the poor recruiter (who was likely doing this with dozens of other candidates for this and other openings simultaneously) could make a judgment call.
Now, your hard skills are represented by more than just what you remember to include on your resume. Your soft skills are more than what your former boss recalls about your performance. And the recruiter doesn’t have to rely on their own judgment to make the right call about your fit in the office culture, or how empathetic you’ll be toward your coworkers.
Use Your Existing Skills as a Foundation
The thing about hard job skills is that they build exponentially. Once you have a foundation, whether from code camps or real-world work experience, you can leverage them to go deeper into your chosen skillset, or you can branch out into tangentially related areas. Have a background in Ruby on Rails? Use that as a springboard to do an academy on Python. Consider yourself an Excel expert? How are you with relational databases?
And by using a gamified platform to do this skill expansion, you have a built-in audience of recruiters watching your journey. When you gain new expertise, you just might catch the eye of a recruiter from that company you’ve been eyeing. Or you may hear from a recruiter who likes what they see on your profile to let you know that if you added this other skill, in particular, they’d love to talk about a future opening.
Gamified Platform Bonus #1: Badges
Finish another academy? Badge.
Complete a challenge? Badge.
Earn a certain number of badges? Badge.
Are you seeing the pattern here? The bonuses of using a gamified recruitment platform for your next job hunt are manifold, badges being just the tip of the iceberg. Whenever you accomplish something on the platform, your profile is boosted with a new badge. When a recruiter receives the results of that challenge or academy, they can decide to reach out directly to you based on those results combined with what they see on your profile. Additionally, every other recruiter on the platform has access to see your badge collection, so you may find yourself with multiple recruiters from awesome companies you never even thought about vying for your attention.
Takeaways
You see where we’re going, gamification opens new horizons when it comes to conducting your next job hunt by combining traditional recruiting aspects with new avenues to explore your skills. You can branch out, knowing that the skills you pick up are in demand because the academies and challenges are designed and posted directly from the hiring companies. Helping you find the skills you need to land your dream job is what gamified recruiting platforms are all about, and combining these divergent factors and using AI and machine learning technology to compose a scorecard is how they do it.
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