How to use serious games in HR

Serious games have proven to be exceptionally useful when applied to various aspects of human resources (HR). As computer technology has evolved, the options for using online serious games for recruitment, onboarding, and corporate training has become virtually endless. With the en mass move to remote and hybrid working patterns, online serious game training can offer a level of engagement that makes more traditional human resource management practices seem wildly obsolete.

How human resources has become gamified

Human resources departments are concerned with everything and anything employee-related. They are responsible for hiring and onboarding talented candidates, training those qualified candidates, and developing and retaining them as employees. Qualified and well trained employees are what makes an organisation successful and allows it to grow and innovate, so the importance of getting good return on investment (ROI) from human resource management practices is of paramount importance.

Gamification in the workplace

In 1973 Charles A. Coonradt wrote The Game of Work. This book foreshadowed gamification in the workplace by examining why people worked harder in sports and recreation than they did at their place of work. The basic premise was, how could 5 recreational footballers give their heart and soul once a week in their local 5-a-side game, pushing their physical and mental powers to the brink, but fail to effectively engage with projects at their day jobs? What could we learn? While Coonradt’s book came out long before the term gamification was coined and established, it does acknowledge the principles of gamification and serious games and how they can be used by organisations to improve employee engagement.

Gamification, broadly speaking, is the application of gaming elements to traditionally less playful tasks, such as recruitment and training, in order to make them more engaging. Serious games are an aspect of gamification, but the two terms are not interchangeable. Whereas gamification could apply things like badges and progress bars to otherwise regular tasks, those gamification elements make that regular task more engaging but don’t necessarily make it into a game. A serious game, by contrast, can be defined as a game that is not purely for entertainment, and that has a clearly defined and “serious” purpose at the core of its design.

Clearly defined business purposes, such as identifying a talented and appropriate candidate for a job, or engaging a team of employees to learn more about a particular aspect of their work, can be very easy to take as the basis for an effective serious game.

Serious games for recruitment

Recruitment isn’t easy. It’s always something of a gamble, and X number of years experience coupled with X qualifications only go so far in ensuring a candidate is right to fill a particular role. This is the first area where serious games can help businesses filter through qualified applicants.

An early and famous example of this is Google’s mystery billboard in 2004. A complex mathematical equation posted on a stark white billboard in Silicon Valley, the answering of which led to a webpage, which posed another equation to solve, which finally requested a CV in order to be considered for a job with the search engine giant. This was an innovative way of using a game to put the eyes of qualified candidates on a job vacancy, where the scale of applications they’d be dealing with would create a lot of administration and man hours.

Use serious games to assess culture fit and aptitude

Obviously, 99 times out of 100, recycling the plot of Good Will Hunting isn’t a feasible strategy. Fortunately, in the modern recruitment environment, serious games pose more universal and repeatable utility for businesses large and small.

Using Question & Answer Games can be a great way to assess the personalities and aptitudes of a large number of candidates in order to limit how many you actually bring to the interview stage. This can save a lot of unnecessary work and shorten the hiring cycle. Creating a Quiz on the Drimify platform allows you to easily assess an applicant’s motivations and ambitions, or further assess their working knowledge in their field, or even their problem solving skills.

The Quiz format is fully customisable, both in terms of content and in terms of appearance and company branding, and you can make the answers multiple choice, open, or even ask applicants to order a series of statements or values. The latter could be an effective way of only bringing forward candidates whose priorities align with those of your business.

Retaining an engaged workforce through serious games

Attracting qualified talent is excellent, but retaining qualified talent protects your investment as an employer. Think of all the time and resources that go into turning promising graduates into corporate wunderkinds; well-trained and versed in your niche, who can quickly adapt to changing practices and high pressure environments. A-star employees are dynamic, creative and ambitious trailblazers, and dynamic, creative, and ambitious trailblazers don’t like to sit still. Retaining talent is a key building block in shoring up an organisation’s future growth and ability to innovate.

In training and development

A big motivator for people moving from one company to another, aside from increased salary, is the opportunity to learn and add to their skillset, and to broaden their experience. Another is feeling disengaged and disconnected from their current company. Serious games in corporate training and upskilling gives businesses a real opportunity to level up their existing talent pools, and allows them to do this whether they’re in the office, or from home if they’re working remotely.

An online training experience could be customised to any ability level and comprise any number of modules. For example, the Dynamic Path™ format on the Drimify platform gives you access to all of the games in the Drimify catalogue, and allows you to customise an interactive learning pathway that looks at all the relevant aspects of an employee’s role. Modules could take the form of Question & Answer Games, purely informative content, be that through video, infographic, or text, and even mini-games tailored to the subject matter.

The important things to consider are the desired training outcomes, be they behavioural, knowledge-based, or skills-based, and the psychological levers you’re pulling to make the serious game work, with particular focus on discovery, challenge, and progression.

For feedback and strategy

You could also customise formats such as the Quiz and the Survey to find out what your employees think of certain issues, and to get an idea of what their ambitions and motivations are. All this data could be collated to help inform future HR strategies and processes, as well as allowing you to make strategic HR decisions in the short to medium term. These could be standalone questionnaires, or even as an evaluation module on a Dynamic Path™ learning course.

Innovate your HR practices with serious games

Serious games can be easily customised to create effective recruitment tools, acting as a filter to only bring the strongest possible candidates to the interview stage. They can also be customised to create highly engaging training experiences, allowing you to develop teams in a dynamic way that is just as effective in a remote setting as it is in the office.

Want to know more?