Gamified application process – how many resumes have you sent out in the last month? How’d it go?
Too often, the application process seems to be, well, broken. More and more companies are implementing automated processes and tools to make their recruiters work easier without pausing to give a moment’s thought to the experience on the other end of the process—the candidate’s journey.
As we enter deeper into the 21st-century, these automated tools seem to be effectively alienating more and more high-quality candidates. These folks are either running to the competition or increasingly they’re finding their way into the “gig economy” as freelancers. Application processes are arduous, taking as long as 45 minutes to a full hour to complete, and often consist of re-entering the same information on your resume into individual fields so the ATS (applicant tracking system) being used can parse that data to determine fit.
Does any of this ring true for you and your candidate experience recently? What if we told you there was a better way?
Introducing The Gamified Online Recruitment Platform
More than just another job board where you find openings, apply, then never hear back. Gamified platforms take the best aspects of the recruiting system and combine them in one place:
- Traditional recruiting — Personalized attention from recruiters
- Recruitment Marketing — Constant status updates, access to human beings, and outreach to potential applicants before an application is ever completed
- ATS — Recruiters have access to everything they need to know about you in one place
- AI (Artificial Intelligence) — Assessment scores, academy test results, and more are combined into a unified, overall picture of you as a person, and as a candidate
The true power of these platforms shines through when you realize that they can take the place of multiple systems while at the same time providing candidates and recruiters more information than ever. We’re going to dive into each of the above categories today, highlighting the impact we see these platforms having on the candidate experience and how they’re changing the face of recruiting.
Traditional Recruiting Still has a Seat at the Table
Far be it for us to disparage things like resumes and cover letters. A solid well-rounded resume and a well-crafted cover letter aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. There remains no better way to introduce yourself to a company and convey a snapshot of the experience and skills you bring to the table. Together, these documents form the foundation for the overall picture a recruiter will get of you as a person and as a candidate looking to join their workforce via any gamified platform.
Recruitment Marketing Provides Access to Passive Job Seekers
Recruitment marketing is a recent development in HR that borrows heavily from Inbound Marketing. The tactics and techniques being employed allow recruiters to grow and nurture a talent pool full of passive job seekers (folks who are not currently looking to change positions, but who are open to a great offer). That way, when an opening appears, they can draw from this pre-screened pool to fill the opening quickly and with far less effort and expense. This methodology has grown in response to the candidate-centric nature of today’s job market and works to the candidate’s favor since it cuts the overall application process considerably. Gamified platforms like Jobful offer a one-stop-shop for these relationships to blossom.
The ATS Black Hole
The modern application process is broken. Did we already say that? Oh well, it bears repeating. ATS solutions are often more of a hindrance than a boon to the recruitment process. With a start-to-finish application experience that can stretch to a full hour, with tedious data entry filling most of that time, this is an area ripe for disruption. And gamified platforms offer just that. By simply playing games that serve as hard skills assessments as well as personality tests, you as the candidate will never even see the back-end process in action. You take the assessments, send the results to the recruiters for companies you’re interested in, and they reach out to you to continue the conversation. No longer will you be forced to abandon an application midway through, or complete one only to never hear back.
AI: The Power Behind The Curtain
We’ve all had applications rejected before ever being seen by human eyes. It’s a disheartening part of a modern job hunt, right? Not necessarily. The AI that powers the new wave of gamified recruitment tools is there to assist the human recruiters, not replace them. By taking assessment scores, challenge results, and factors such as resumes and cover letters into account, the AI-powered algorithms that support these platforms present a holistic view of the candidate as a person, not a set of metrics.
How Gamified Recruiting Platforms Address these Challenges
From the sounds of it, the recruiting process is in need of a bit of a revamp, huh? While there have been other, previous attempts at doing just that, we believe it’s the current wave of gamified solutions that will actually accomplish this lofty goal. How? Easy, by using AI to combine all of the above aspects of a traditional application process and simplify it into a unified, streamlined one-stop-shop for recruiters and job seekers alike.
The process looks something like this:
- You upload a resume and cover letter to your site profile.
- Then, you look around and find challenges that test your relevant hard skills. These are provided by recruiters on the platform, so they’re tailored to the skills they’re actively looking for and results go directly back to them.
- Now find an academy that looks fun and appropriate, and dive in. Your results from these classes are combined with your resume and challenge scores to increase the accuracy of your holistic score in the system.
- Then, look for some of the personality assessments. These aim to discover how good a cultural fit you would be at any given employer. By taking into account factors like teamwork, emotional intelligence, and empathy, these assessments are then combined with everything else to produce that holistic overview we keep talking about.
By including a cutting-edge platform like this in your job search, you are able to take advantage of recruiters who are early adopters and are looking for candidates just like you. Once you have a complete profile, keep coming back to search the job listings and reach out to recruiters who may not have found you via your profile yet. Take further advantage of having a direct line to human beings without having to jump through any automated hoops to get there.
The job search process of 2019 may seem broken, but we see promising signs that 2020 will herald the beginning of a thriving community of recruiters, AI-backed platforms, and candidates working together to get the right person in the right seat at the right time. And that’s the ultimate goal of a job search after all.
Book a demo & join the future of recruitment.
