How Gamification Can Transform Your Recruiting Team

Gamification has received a lot of airtime lately, and for good reason - the benefits of gamification in the workplace range from higher employee engagement and participation to increased creativity and knowledge retention. In fact, in one recent study, 90% of employees experienced increased productivity in a gamified work environment.  

However, successfully deploying a gamification initiative requires that you reward the right behaviors - as these will become the best practices for your team. If you set goals that ignore workflow and process, there’s a good chance you’ll cultivate a “by any means necessary” approach in which short cuts become common practice. 

Here are three applications of gamification that reinforce workflow best practices AND help your team hit hiring goals.

Email Engagement

When it comes to recruiting email outreach, personalization is the proven best practice - increasing click-through-rates by over 14%.

To foster email personalization at your organization, structure incentives around email engagement rates rather than overall engagement goals. Percentages such as open rate, click-through-rate, and response rate indicate overall quality of messaging; while static numbers such as number of responses can be reached by sacrificing quality for quantity.

Try it out: To incentivize subject line creativity, you can run a competition around highest email open rate. Not only will your recruiters be motivated to test out new subject line strategies, but it will also help you to establish benchmarks for your organization for send time, subject line length, and personalization. 

Pipeline Quality

When racing to fill a job req, it’s easy to play a numbers game - trying to get as many people as possible through the door in the hopes that one of them will work out. But by focusing on getting the right people through the door, your team can work smarter rather than harder. 

Every team has pipeline numbers to hit, but if your team is only concerned with those numbers than you risk losing them to the “any means” mentality. Here’s where gamification comes into play. 

Try it out: Because many interview processes are lengthy, the best way to get an initial read on pipeline quality is phone screen conversion - the percentage of sourced candidates that make it through the phone screen stage. This tells you how successfully recruiters are identifying star candidates, and encourages recruiters not only properly vet candidates but get creative in order to attract the most sought-after talent. Reward the recruiter with the highest conversion rate a Friday off of their choosing - they won’t need the extra day anyways with those leaderboard phone screen stats. 

Candidate Experience

Candidate experience can tell you a lot about your team’s overall recruiting process. Positive candidate experience is the result of diligent effort and a consistent follow up on the part of the recruiter. Therefore structuring a contest around highest candidate experience is a surefire way to reward positive workflow. 

There are a number of ways to measure candidate experience, but one of the most popular is candidate satisfaction surveys - in which candidate feedback is collected and assigned a numerical score. You can collect this information at many different points throughout the hiring process, and it can be as simple as sending a quick email or SMS. 

Try it out: Post-interview, have your recruiters send out a quick poll asking candidates to rate their experience from 1-10. There are a number of candidate engagement platforms you can use to easily collect this data, or simply ask them to respond via email and have recruiters manually track responses. The recruiter with the highest average score is your winner and should be asked to share their workflow with the rest of the team in order to identify the differentiators in their process.  

If you are looking to increase team morale and reinforce best practices, gamification is a great addition to your managerial toolkit - given thoughtful design and clear objectives. We’d love to hear how you’ve implemented gamification within your workplace - share with us in the comments below.