How Recruitainment Is Changing the Recruiting Industry - Workology

How Recruitainment Is Changing the Recruiting Industry - Workology Gamification of Recruitment   Weve all read the articles: 5 tips to get your CV noticed or How to make your connections turn into a job. The recruitment industry as a whole is an ocean of bias, personal opinion, connections, and let’s faces it, a whole lot of luck.   To land your dream job, you will need to have a CV full of ivy-league schools, relevant experience, raving recommendations and still you may not make it through the front door.  Top talent who may not have the right connections or could not afford the brand name schools miss valuable opportunities because the recruitment industry is so focused on whom you know instead of what you know. This process does not look any better from a company perspective. The traditional recruitment process is time consuming and very expensive. Subjective reviews of over-inflated CVs by HR personnel takes up a lot of resources, and rarely result in good ROI. Interview questions assess self-evaluation and are fairly stock standard. Candidates come to interviews with pre-planned responses making sure to use keywords that HR managers are looking for. Although the industry has a long way to go, there is a bright side. The last few years there has been a huge alteration not only in the best way to test true skills of candidates, but also a move to make the process more fun. Yes… I said fun.   Gamification of Recruitment   The recruitment industry, like many other industries has turned to gamification. Quizzes, social media platforms, virtual reality and online competitions are now being used to find and engage top talent. The gamification industry is projected to be a 5.5 billion dollar market by 2018, so it’s about time the recruitment industry joined the party.   Early adopters of this so called recrutainment trend have seen huge benefits. Marriott International, who created a virtual reality Sims-like game in which players have to juggle all the responsibilities of a hotel kitchen manager, was one of the first to dive into gamification. Other big name companies followed; Dell, Wells Fargo, PwC, Wal-Mart and L’Oréal are all using gamifcation in their recruitment strategies.   External agencies and crowdsourcing techniques have proven popular as well. Sqore, a fast-growing Swedish startup that specializes in gamified recruitment, acts as the middleman between organizations and top candidates. Both startups and international organizations alike have also used crowdsourcing techniques such as hackatons where coders compete to showcase their coding skills, and ultimately land jobs.   These early adopters have found a faster and simpler way to find candidates with the correct skills, both based on the position requirements and company culture.  They are introducing candidates to jobs and fields they may have never explored or even considered before, and doing so in a fun and interactive way. The best part is, the company can choose exactly which angle they want to take it. Pure skills testing, work based scenarios, product development, innovation… the ways in which recruiters can gamify their recruitment strategy are endless.   From a candidate perspective, there is now finally an outlet to let your uber-competitive inner-selves shine. Test out different jobs, and showcase your skills without leaving the comfort of your couch. You can finally stop  adding new fonts to your CV and sending messages to anyone who could potentially get you an interview. If you have the skills, and are ready to compete to show them off, you can finally land your dream job by what you know, not who you know.   My recommendation?  Start checking out organizations that have gamified their recruitment process. Fingers crossed, this may be the start of skills being the frontrunner of the recruitment process.  Say good-bye (or more like good riddance) to the CV.