Recruitment Assessments To Include Video Games?

The pressure to find the right candidate for a position is becoming bigger and more stressful for every company. The stakes relating to every recruitment and HR decision are becoming bigger and companies are continually re-evaluating what they are looking for when it comes time to expand their team or bring someone new into the organisation.

While qualifications can be important and a good marker on what a candidate offers, this is far from the full story when it comes to judging professionals and potential employees. However, there needs to be some way of reducing the number of potential candidates a company wants to interview. After all, the interview process can be time-consuming, both in the preparation and then the analysis, so steps have to be taken to find what clients could potentially be the right fit for a role or company.

Rather than looking at a person’s CV or qualifications, there is a suggestion that video games may provide insight into who the best candidate for a role would be. For some people, this sounds like a dream scenario, and something that would see them feeling more engaged with the job market. For other people, this sounds like the latest gimmick or fad that will quickly pass before people revert to traditional methods.

One firm believes these games will help recruiters find the right person

The company behind a series of games, Arctic Shores, don’t think this is a passing fad though and they believe that how players perform in these games provides a lot of information about their character and mind-set. A single 30 minute session can provide over 3,000 data points on a person and the company believes that they can determine over 20 different personality traits based on how a player performs in the game.

You may not have thought too much about what your gaming style says about you but the software producers believe your appetite for risk, your drive, your persistence, your ability to learn, how you perform under pressure and how resilient you are can all be determined by how a player performs when playing a game. This is the sort of insight that may help a firm decide between different candidates, helping them to narrow down the scope of suitable applicants.

There will naturally be some concern from people who aren’t gamers, fearing that people who play games regularly will hold a natural advantage when companies use this approach. This has been denied by the manufacturers, saying the psychometric games only require players to flick their finger to participate. That is likely to be the case but if some people find themselves fearing the worst, the psychological nature of these games could see some people fare than they would do in a more traditional test.

It is good that technology is being used and considered to aid the recruitment process and in years to come, this style of evaluation is likely to become commonplace. This time may still be in the distance but with technology improving at a rapid rate, it may not be too long until gaming skills and the ability to utilise modern digital equipment are common factors in the recruitment industry.

November 2016 Author : 2XL Recruitment Solutions part of 2XL Media Solutions