Calibrate your hype detectors! Stock up on BS repellent! Gamification has come to recruiting.
Gamification is already the “next big thing” in management and training. We’re promised that it will change the dissatisfied to the engaged while painlessly and effortlessly helping people learn complex skills. Now the same promise and hype have come to recruiting.
Check out The Economist article: “Work and play: The gamification of hiring.” Here’s a quote. The “Knack” referred to is a game company founded by Isreali entrepreneur Guy Halfteck.
“Knack combines three fashionable trends: gaming, the use of massive amounts of data and the application of behavioural insights from science. According to Chris Chabris of the Centre for Collective Intelligence at MIT, a member of the Knack team, games have huge advantages over traditional recruitment tools, such as personality tests, which can easily be outwitted by an astute candidate. Many more things can be tested quickly and performance can’t be faked on Knack’s games, he says.”
That’s the promise. Here’s the hype in another quote from the same article.
“A pilot now under way with students at Yale combines the results of games with academic grades. As little as ten minutes of play can yield enough data to predict performance, says Mr. Halfteck.”
Really? When you read phrases like “predict performance” reach for that handy can of BS repellant. “Performance” is not a global characteristic. It’s both person- and situation-specific. You may be able to measure specific cognitive skills. You may be able to compare performance on a game with the performance profile of people who are successful at a given job. But we can’t predict performance in the real world using games.
Any game developer, even one armed with Big Data, faces two daunting challenges. The first is to create a good game. If the game isn’t fun and engaging to play, not much else matters. And players will constantly be comparing your game with the top commercial games on the market.
The second challenge is that the game needs to reliably serve a business purpose. That purpose may be skill building. It may be separating wheat from chaff. It may be attracting the people you want to your company.
Neither challenge is easy. Put them together and you’ve got a really hard job. So, for now at least, keep the hype detector running and the BS repellant at the ready.
