Gamification in the Selection Process

Friday, November 08, 2013

 

Gamification is the process of applying of game-like techniques to address organizational issues including employee screening and selection.  Consider that you must source, recruit, select, onboard, train, and assign 50 new customer service representatives (CSR) for a new service center within 30 days.  Traditional methods could take much more than 30 days just to source, recruit, select, and onboard 50 employees.  Now they have to be trained, requiring 40 classroom hours to reach mastery.  Past experience has show that 20% of new hires fail to achieve mastery and must be released, requiring that you over staff to compensate for the potential turnover.

 

Our gamification approach is to create a game-like scenario and invite our pool of applicants to “play” the game as part of the selection process.  The applicant creates a profile giving themselves a user name, password, and an alter ego avatar and enters the game at the lowest level.  The applicant’s avatar is presented with the basic duties of the CSR’s role as well as a tool kit with a limited number of solutions to entry level tasks.

 

Next the CSR is faced with entry level challenges and simulations from the game’s “wizard”, i.e., logging on to the system, recording time and tasks, logging an inbound call,  re-directing calls, assigning calls to a higher level CSR, … etc.  Our avatar is permitted to reach into their toolkit for solutions to these entry-level tasks.  Each solution contains basic information on the task, response(s) to the task, and a simulated exercise.  Successful completion of the simulation and challenge allows our avatar to attempt the next challenge.

 

The game’s wizard rewards each successful challenge encounter with “game bucks” and offers coaching on any unsuccessful encounter.  Our avatar may attempt any challenge an unlimited number of times, but cannot advance to the next game level until they have successfully completed each challenge at the current level.  As our avatar advances to the next level, they are awarded a “badge” recognizing their current level of achievement and a few game bucks.  Game bucks are used to buy a solution toolkit for each succeeding level and can be used to buy additional solutions for the current level if our avatar runs out of toolkit solutions.

 

The game’s design may include numerous task levels from entry to supervisory.  As our avatar progresses to each succeeding level in the game, the challenges become more difficult and the simulations become more complex and lengthy.  Our avatar may choose to stop and end the game at any level.  Based on the applicant’s past experience and skill level, they may successfully complete one or all levels.  Information collected during the applicant’s play provides the selection decision maker(s) with an insight into the applicant’s possible performance.  Such information is intended to “assist” with a robust selection and assignment process and is NOT intended to supplant practices such as personal interviews, background, and reference checks.