How Gamification Helps in Employee Selection Paper Example

Thank you for allowing me this opportunity to evaluate how the company may apply the concept of gamification in employee selection and make appropriate recommendations with regards to potential changes and impact the company may experience with the introduction of gamification concept. The contemporary business environment has compelled the shift in prevailing ideologies of human resource management at workplaces such as our company and new strategies such as gamification should be put in place to manage the new skills and attitudes of today's technological era workers commonly known as digital natives (Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2016). For the company to compete favorably in the global market, there is a need to put more emphasis in offering digital services to consumers, existing employees and potential employees (Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2016). This report seeks to elaborate in depth the concept of gamification and how the company can apply the use of games in employee selection processes.

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Gamification is a concept that uses games to replace the traditional non-game techniques of employee selection (DuVernet & Popp, 2014). Traditional employee selection processes have been criticized for unfair perceptions for many years because of their predictors and methods of selection. Many companies are struggling to strike a balance between identifying the protected classes as defined by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, predicting job performance and maintaining positive reactions from employee selection processes. The concept of gamification is therefore essential as it impacts on all these three areas of traditional selection processes. Gamification in the employee selection enhances fairness perceptions as it creates reliability, validity and fairness (Tong et al., 2016).

This company should apply the concept of gamification because of the full range of advantages it has over traditional employee selection. Some of these advantages include using the game elements in identifying the right personnel to fit in the company's objectives and goals rather than going through thousands of curriculum vitae in a market that is crowded with fresh talent. Gamification will be relevant to the company because it will help the company test variety of traits from just one game, and these traits include attention to detail, verbal and math skills, problem-solving skills, and critical thinking among others (Khullar & Pandey, 2014). The company should also rely on gamification as an employee selection tool because good performance displayed in the virtual world is a reflection of how the candidate will perform in the real world. The company should also apply gamification to help build a strong brand as it provides procedural justice and it enhances the relationship between the use of technology and the applicant reactions to selection systems. Some of these reaction outcomes facilitated by the use of games include organizational attraction, test-taking motivation and good intentions towards the organization.

The company should be confident in applying the concept of gamification because its application and the gaming processes meet the standards provided by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1978), the National Council on Measurement in Education (1999), American Psychological Association, American Educational Research Association, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (2003). These statutes provide guidelines that are used for the creation of psychometrically valid assessment tools. These guidelines ensure that tests must be fair, accurate, and reliable, and this is the primary objective of gamification. Finally, the use of gamification in serious games will help the company to effectively have fair assessment procedures which prevent unintentional discrimination against members of the protected classes, and these classes include sex, religion, nationality, color, race, and age and disability status.

I recommend to the executive that they choose gamification over the traditional employee selection processes as it will give the company an edge in the digital society plus it also adds a certain level of uniqueness. Potential candidates will be fully engaged with the company's career sites and social media profiles (Looyestyn et al., 2017). The concept of gamification is simple, entertaining and interactive, and the company should adopt different games for different approaches and measures involved in job selection. The primary objective of the game should be to unveil the real candidate by extracting necessary data of the candidate in terms of job performance, but it should also be designed in a manner that benefits the company and the player with insights of the company (Danelli, 2015). From my evaluation and details provided in the report, I hope the company will be convinced to apply the concept of gamification fully.

Yours Faithfully,

Name

Gamification in Employee Selection

Organizations are turning to the concept of gamification as a way of increasing their competitive advantage over their competitors because of its elements of competition that helps attract and retain future employees by reducing the cost of employee turnover. Advancement in technology and improved digital technologies has prompted the need for digital capabilities for organizations and their employees. Due to the rise of digital society, organizations emphasize the necessity of offering digital services to their consumers, existing employees and their potential candidates (Spitzer, 2014). To this end, the concept of gamification a technique that uses game elements is applied by organizations to replace the traditional non-game processes of recruitment and employee selection (DuVernet & Popp, 2014). Gamification is not a novel idea, but with the current surge of technological advancement, organizations have now realized and accepted its worth in the employee selection that offers great benefit to both the employees and the organizations. This paper, therefore, seeks to discuss in depth the concept of gamification and how organizations are applying it in employee selection processes.

Gamification is used for non-entertainment reasons such as to recruit, train, engage and retains future employees, and this is the primary reason why innovative organizations are turning to the elements of games to help find the right personnel to fit in their organizations' objectives and goals (Entertainment Software Association, 2015). Over the years, recruitment and employee selection processes have proved to be a very costly endeavor because of the time and resources used to find the best fit for a particular job which involves going through thousands of curriculum vitae in the very competitive market. Many organizations are relying on gamification as a recruitment tool because they believe that good performance in the virtual world is a reflection of how the candidate will perform in the real world (Simpson & Jenkins, 2015).

Games are gaining a lot of recognition among organizations because of their abilities to test specific traits such as attention to detail, verbal and math skills, problem-solving skills, and critical thinking among others (Wozniak, 2015). The scores represented by these games indicate talent signals and various potential of the future employees that may not be otherwise demonstrated by a resume (Wozniak, 2015). Gamification helps a fun element in the whole recruitment and employee selection process as it engages the potential employee with the company by providing a simulated work environment (Entertainment Software Association, 2015). Through gamification, the prospective employees can grasp the company's information and policies and have fun at the same time. This process helps companies to quickly eliminate unworthy employees because it allows tests skills such as time management, innovative thinking and creativity (Simpson & Jenkins, 2015).

The primary objective of gamification is to provide stimulus for action and motivation to complete specific tasks that help the candidates to demonstrate their skills extensively (Landers, 2014). This game allows employers to reward and recognize the best-fit candidates for particular jobs. For instance, tech giants such as Facebook and Google use games like Facebook Hacker Cup and Code Jam respectively to attract new talents in the markets. Gamification enhances the sourcing of skills from activities such as tests and puzzles, rewards, video-based interviews, virtual job fairs and real-time progress among others (Khullar & Pandey, 2014).

Organizations in the past relied on specific predictors and methods during employee selection processes (Spitzer, 2014). Organizations focused on the balance between identifying protected classes as provided by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, predicting job performance of potential employees, and maintaining positive reactions from the employee selection process (Wozniak, 2015). The innovation of game-thinking in the concept of gamification is essential because it impacts on all these three areas that traditional selection processes relied on (Wozniak, 2015). The game elements of gamification enhance fairness perceptions of the current selection processes over conventional methods. Some of these game elements include online surveys and personality tests. Factors of test validity indicate that gamified assessments are bringing new insight into the prediction of job performance (Tong et al., 2016).

Gamification helps organizations in employee selection in the sense that it creates fairness perceptions in the process (Simpson & Jenkins, 2015). The traditional selection systems are perceived to be unfair, and these adverse effects affect employees even after the hiring process. The conventional selection systems have been criticized for increasing test anxiety and decreasing test motivation. Unfair perception about selection systems is well defined by the organizational justice theory. This theory provides that distribution of reward (distributive justice) in terms of the applicants who received the job offer, and the procedures of delivery of that reward (procedural justice) are the main determinants of fairness perceptions (Simpson & Jenkins, 2015). Poor fairness perceptions of employee selection processes impact on the employee's self-efficacy, loss of interest in organizational attractiveness, lack of self-esteem, and decreased job offer acceptance, job satisfaction, performance and turnover. These poor perceptions may also prompt litigation processes against the organizations. The invention of gamification, therefore, comes handy when dealing with poor impressions of employee selection.

Potential employees' reactions are driven by perceptions to the use of new technology such as gamification in selection systems. Recent research indicates that the usage of gamification provides procedural justice and it enhances the relationship between the use of technology and the applicant reactions to selection systems (Narayanan et al., 2016). Some of these reaction outcomes facilitated by the use of games include organizational attraction, test-taking motivation and good intentions towards the organization. Gamification in selection processes is however affected by computer experience which acts as a moderator in the relationship between applicant's reactions outcomes to the selection procedures (Narayanan et al., 2016).

Applicants with greater computer experience have a stronger relationship between procedural justice perceptions and outcomes. Technological expe...