Gamification and Why Recruiters Need It

Gamification works by encouraging users to engage in game-like behaviours, in non-game contexts. Having heard a lot about it this year I predict gamification’s role in the industry will act as a game changer (pun intended), so if you’re not already thinking about how you can apply it to your recruitment strategy, then perhaps it’s time to start!

Now that the concept of social recruiting has established itself and is no longer considered a passing phase, it’s now constantly offering us new and innovative ways to crowdsource. The use of social networks is evidently a successful route and the new ways in which recruiters are interacting with candidates is allowing for more enjoyable brand experiences. Brands that are choosing to use gamification are obtaining higher levels of retention and building bigger online communities. It’s serving the common purpose of engagement and generating better user experiences.

Information technology research firm Gartner has already predicted that over 70% of Forbes Global 2000 organisations will have at least one gamified application by 2014, with a belief that 25% of day-to-day business processes will be using aspects of gamification. Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner, explains:

Gamification aims to inspire deeper, more engaged relationships and to change behavior, but it needs to be implemented thoughtfully. Most attempts at gamification currently miss the mark, but successful and sustainable gamification can convert customers into fans, turn work into fun, or make learning a joy. The potential is enormous.

What role is gamification starting to play in recruitment?

So what role is gamification starting to play in recruitment – an industry that is using social media now more than ever? One of the key advantages of using gamification in recruitment relies on the fact that not only will candidates be coming back regularly to interact with your brand, but they will be acting as

advocates for your brand. A good gamification strategy has users encouraging friends and family to engage too, so they are essentially acting as recruiters themselves. Surely this is the recruiter’s dream!

Gamification provides users with a sense of belonging and encourages, what Matthew Jeffery of Autodesk described as, “stickiness to sites” – he also points out the potential for monetisation that comes with using gamification in your business strategy.

Examples

By: MATAVI@

Marriott created an excellent recruitment campaign to attract potential employees – using an online game entitled My Marriott Hotel. It was created with the intent to encourage young people to take an interest in hospitality as a career path. The virtual game is much like Farmville or The Sims, requiring candidates to demonstrate their skills in a fun, online environment. It was a social media success that drove traffic to their Facebook career page (which currently has 113,000 likes).

However, the benefits of gamification are not solely about attracting candidates or consumers, it’s also being used to engage clients too.

Take for example Global Corporate Challenge – a business that attracts some of the world’s biggest corporations as their clients every year, purely on the merit of what is essentially gamification which gets the world moving. They are the world’s leading and largest corporate health initiative and users devotedly engage in the game-like experience. They have highly refined expertise in behavioural change and that is key to their success.

Although gamification is a relatively new concept for the recruitment industry, it has been implemented to great success in the advertising world for a few years now. Gamification is being integrated into advertising campaigns, globally; encouraging brand engagement and facilitating great results.

Another example is Nike and their Nike+ campaign. A campaign which gamified running, with a seamless integration of their brand into the consumers’ everyday lives. They created a Nike+ tag running app, which links running directly with social gaming. Essentially anyone using the app is in a game of virtual ‘tag’ and must keep running to avoid being ‘it’. So if you run the shortest distance among the group you are playing with, you are ‘it’. It’s a smart use of gamification because it took something that people find hard to get motivated for and offered a direct incentive. Whether this is social like in this case or through a reward based system.

Foursquare, Klout, Kred and Peer Index are all good examples of successful reward and high score systems. They appeal to an individual’s sense of achievement and create an appeal to return. Although LinkedIn’s Endorsements features has been received with mixed reviews, it’s a prime example of clever gamification suited to their audience. The number of endorsements people have on their profile almost work as a badge system, and will be used to highlight thought-leaders and also show up in searches.

Conclusions

Gamification doesn’t have to be expensive and, like with most things, simplicity is the key! I would use it to increase brand awareness, build a community, integrate it in as part of a mobile strategy, with the end result leading to more applications.

via Gamification and Why Recruiters Need It.

Gamification and Why Recruiters Need It

How important is human interaction in the recruitment process?

So, how can you make the recruitment process more human, whilst maintaining the efficiencies created by using technology?

It could be as simple as picking up the phone to personally thank a candidate for applying for a role instead of sending an email. Some organisations have welcomed video interviewing into their recruitment process, providing face-to-face interaction from the start.

Staying in touch with the candidates in your talent pool, including the ones that were unsuitable for previous roles, can be a simple but effective process to adopt too. You can keep in touch by sending an email or calling them to let them know about new vacancies as and when they come up through tagging or skilling their cv automatically.

And the reasons why you would want to? You will ultimately improve the candidate experience and consequently improve the image of your employer brand.

Here are some more tips to make your recruitment process more human:

Encourage employees to update their social networking profiles – to include information about their job and how much they love working at your company (this will help to boost your brand and show that people are happy to work for you!)

Apply for a job at your own company. How long did it take? Was it tedious? Make notes and make changes to make the experience better.

How are the candidates being informed about the status of their application? Monitor how they are being contacted and make sure that they are not put off working for your company in the future.

Incorporate human interactivity. Don’t leave it to technology to take the candidate to interview stage. Give them a call after you send an interview request maybe

Shorten forms – forms are boring! If they are long, you will see a large drop off rate and you will tarnish the impression that potential candidate has of your business

If you have any more tips for improving candidate experience, let us know!

via How important is human interaction in the recruitment process?.

How important is human interaction in the recruitment process?

How To Hire A New Employee And Make Sure You Don"t Fire Them

You just hired a new employee for $100K; congratulations!

Recruiting is expensive.  You probably spent 30-50% of her compensation recruiting her (her recruiting cost ratio), and if she leaves early you’ll lose another 30-50% of her compensation recruiting her replacement.  So how do you increase the odds that she says with you?

Last week, I wrote about how you can start a new job and not get fired.  My concern here is the other side of the table: how you can hire a new person and not end up firing them. At ff VC, we have a particular interest in this topic, given our investments in TheResumator and Identified.com.

Onboarding properly not only helps workers get up to speed as quickly as possible—it is also instrumental in retaining those workers for many years to come as effective, committed employees. Research has shown that onboarding processes have a significant and measurable impact on job satisfaction and performance, as well as organizational commitment, work withdrawal, and turnover.

Although it can be costly to train, equip, and integrate new hires, the payoff is ultimately well worth it. See the graph below from Watson Wyatt.

 

To assist with onboarding, I’ve developed a short list of best practices:

Before hiring

• Understand the candidate’s role and confer with anyone that would be working with them. Make sure everyone is on the same page, and that it is indeed worthwhile to make the hire.


• Having defined the role, determine what metrics will be most predictive of success, and design objective tests to assess candidates.


• Once you have assessed competence, verify that the candidate will be a good cultural fit before making a final decision.

Prior to first day

• Add the employee’s name to contact, routing, and distribution lists.


• Send the new hire an information packet with background on your company, the people they will be working with, and their role. Address any logistical concerns such as getting into the building, parking, where to go, how to dress, etc.


• The hire will probably have a few questions. Give them a point of contact.


• Plan their first day. Structure will make the hire feel more comfortable and minimize the possibility for confusion. Include the plan as part of the information packet.


• Ensure some flexibility in your own schedule to handle anything that comes up.


• Set up the hire’s workspace and make sure they will be able to connect to the office network.


• Call the hire to check in and see if they have any questions


• Send an announcement about the hire’s role and arrival to everyone who will be working with them.

First day

• Introduce the employee to a mentor, and set up more time to talk later in the day.


• Give a tour of the facility.


• Have the employee fill out any forms or documents you will need.


• Take them out to lunch.


• Have work ready for them. Even though it will be some time before new hires are fully onboarded and able to operate autonomously, it is important that they feel like they are contributing. Pick something that won’t overwhelm them, but will acclimate them to the sort of work they will ultimately be doing. Hopefully, you can set a pattern for effective interaction.

Ongoing

• Give regular feedback. Eventually the employee will internalize your standards and procedures, but in the meantime you should be explicit.


• Ask them for feedback on you. This feedback will be useful for adjusting your approach to that particular employee, as well as continuously improving your onboarding process.

 

via How To Hire A New Employee And Make Sure You Don’t Fire Them – Forbes.

How To Hire A New Employee And Make Sure You Don"t Fire Them

A Recruiter’s Values

What do we stand for?

What is it we do as recruiters? Fill jobs? Source candidates? Use ATS, social networks, job boards, etc? An excellent recruiter and friend of mine — John Amodeo — has a great answer. John says we’re in the life-changing business. Think about it. When we fill a job we’ve transformed somebody’s life, hopefully for the better.

This is the human side of our work, which it seems many of us ignore. I’m just as guilty of this. It’s easy to lose sight of that in the shuffle when we’re neck deep in Linkedin, Facebook, video resumes, and all the other cool technologies we use. I was fortunate to start my career in recruiting managing a team of recruiters, never having hired anyone myself. At the time candidates were just resumes to me. It wasn’t until later that I became a hands-on recruiter. That was when I realized recruiting was more than moving documents and tracking a process.

Giving people jobs meant a lot. I got to talk with really interesting people — like the guy who did an interview on a satellite phone from an oil rig in the gulf of Mexico. Or the one who was in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and survived because he walked down 87 floors.

Finding Talent or Giving Jobs

Do you remember the thrill of getting your first offer letter, or subsequent ones? It’s usually the same for most people. Getting a job means a lot, unless one is completely jaded. A job represents more than income — it conveys a sense of self worth. It means a person can be a provider and independent of others and has something of value to contribute. But is that what we’re supposed to care about? After all, we’re paid by employers to fill jobs, and the golden rule says that he who has the gold makes the rules.

It seems the human side of recruiting is being sidelined. My recent post on discrimination against the unemployed triggered some very emotional responses. The conversation did make me wonder if as recruiters we need to do something to help these people. Are we our brother’s keepers? That’s for each of us to decide. I don’t think I am, but that doesn’t mean I can’t show more concern for others. What are our ethics? I remember a business ethics class in grad school where the professor told us on the first day that ethics meant knowing the difference between right and wrong, and doing something about the wrongs. There is something wrong about rejecting a candidate just for being unemployed, without knowing anything about the circumstances.

With 5 million people out of work, shouldn’t we be doing something to help? Don’t we all know someone who’s in that boat? As recruiters what have we become if we can’t even show we care? Do we stand for anything other than just filling jobs? We don’t have to compromise our principles — jobs should be filled by the most qualified candidates, but reasons like unemployment should not create a permanent underclass of people. We should at least make an effort to educate hiring managers about focusing on skills and ability rather than acting as if these people don’t matter. Many of you may well believe that we owe them nothing and we’re here to do what our employers tell us to do. I happen to disagree.

We’ve automated recruiting a great deal, and mostly made it better. But let’s not forget that ultimately it’s about people. In the movie “Miracle” — about the U.S. winning the hockey gold at the 1980 winter Olympics — the coach, played by Kurt Russell, is trying to get the team to stop thinking of just themselves. In the most iconic scene he has the players skating back and forth in the ice rink. Earlier whenever he has asked them “Who do you play for?” each player responded with the name of their school. This time they keep going for a long time until finally one player replies “I play for the United States of America.”

Who do you play for?

via A Recruiter’s Values – ERE.net.

A Recruiter’s Values