How gamification techniques can help evaluate candidate’s soft skills in a fun and engaging way

Today’s modern business environment demands soft skills. Employees who already have soft skills find themselves in high demand and can command more competitive salaries. Soft skills are also a key step in advancement; LinkedIn’s 2020 Workplace Learning Report found that managers spend 30% more time learning soft skills than lower-level employees. Businesses recognize the value of soft skills, but should also take the time to make sure that a candidate’s soft skills are a good fit for the company’s needs. This is where new soft skills assessment techniques, like gamification, come into play.

Introduction

Identifying candidates with the proper interpersonal skills, communication skills, and emotional intelligence is crucial during the recruitment process. It is difficult to measure these intangible skills qualities using traditional assessment tools. Let’s take a look at how gamified assessment activities can be helpful when evaluating candidates’ soft skills.

The Relationship Between Gamification and Soft Skills

Traditional assessment methods often fall short in capturing soft skills effectively. However, by incorporating gamification techniques into the recruitment process, employers can create fun and engaging evaluation methods that not only accurately measure candidates’ soft skills but also provide an interactive and immersive experience.

The concept of gamification involves applying game design principles, elements, and mechanics to non-game environments. Using gamification in recruitment lets you find potential employees with valuable workplace soft skills, such as teamwork, communication, leadership, adaptability, and problem-solving. These skills are often important in game scenarios and are harder to capture in interviews. Anybody can say that they have good leadership qualities, but gamification can let you see these skills put to use.

How Gamification can Enhance Soft Skills Evaluation

Gamified hiring experiences are often fun and definitely more engaging than traditional interviews. When you engage candidates through gamified assessments, they are motivated to demonstrate their soft skills more authentically. Gamified assessments will help you establish a level playing field by providing equal opportunity for all candidates to demonstrate their soft skills. You can also provide real-time feedback on candidates’ performance and enable them to improve their soft skills based on their gamified assessment results.

Soft Skills Evaluation Through Gamification

There are several gamification assessments that can help you with hiring elements like communication skills evaluation and problem-solving assessment. Scenarios and role-playing exercises can let candidates demonstrate their ability to communicate and solve problems as they navigate complex situations that closely align with what they might face on the job. Roleplay will also highlight candidates’ communication, empathy, negotiation, conflict resolution, and other essential soft skills.

Team-based activities can make teamwork evaluation in hiring much more effective. Team-based exercises demonstrate candidates’ collaboration, problem-solving, and leadership abilities, as well as their ability to think on their feet and make decisions quickly. Team-based exercises are also good adaptability assessment techniques, since there are lots of variables and unknowns when working with a new team.

Immersive storylines that allow candidates to make decisions and showcase their soft skills within the narrative context. This type of interactive candidate evaluation provides a more realistic and engaging evaluation of soft skills, as candidates must navigate through various challenges and demonstrate their competencies in context. By requiring candidates to make decisions and soft skills within a narrative, storyline-based assessments make these candidates’ soft skills more visible and give the recruitment and hiring managers a better understanding of the candidates’ long-term prospects.

How to Implement Gamified Soft Skills Assessments

Running gamified soft skills assessments is more complex than holding standard interviews, and takes some time and thought to do correctly. You need to clearly define the assessment objectives and the behaviors or indicators associated with the soft skills you are testing. Be candid and forthright about what you are evaluating.

While assessments should be fair, there is room for adaptive assessment design within the gamified evaluation process. This means that the assessment adapts to the candidate’s responses, presenting them with scenarios and challenges that match their demonstrated skill levels. By adjusting the difficulty and complexity of the gamified assessment based on the candidate’s performance, you can gain a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of their soft skills. You should also customize assessments to align with the organization’s values, culture, and job requirements.

In order to ensure consistency and fairness in assessing candidates’ soft skills, establishment of clear evaluation criteria and scoring rubrics are essential. Define what constitutes exemplary, satisfactory, and below-average performance for each soft skill being assessed. Develop a standardized scoring system that objectively measures candidates’ performance based on these predetermined benchmarks. This provides a structured framework for evaluating candidates’ soft skills and allows for fair comparisons among different individuals.

You will also need to incorporate performance metrics within the gamified assessment to measure candidates’ soft skills objectively. These metrics can include response time, decision-making accuracy, effective communication, and collaboration ratings. Additionally, provide candidates with personalized feedback on their performance, highlighting areas of strength and areas for improvement. This feedback can serve as a valuable learning tool for candidates to enhance their soft skills and reflect on their performance.

It is also important to consider gamification as part of a holistic assessment. While gamification offers an innovative approach to assessing soft skills, it is essential to combine it with other evaluation methods for the best possible hiring process. Supplement the gamified assessment with interviews, reference checks, and other traditional evaluation techniques to gather a complete picture of the candidate’s abilities.

Ultimately, you want to provide candidates and recruiters with an intuitive and seamless user experience. The assessment platform should be user-friendly, with clear instructions and easy navigation. Candidates should be able to understand the objectives and expectations of the assessment easily. Likewise, recruiters should have access to a user-friendly interface that allows them to review and evaluate candidates’ performance efficiently.

Conclusion

Taking a gamification approach to evaluating candidates’ soft skills is innovative, enjoyable, and provides great results. Organizations can gain deeper insight into candidates’ interpersonal capabilities and showcase their true potential through gamified assessments in a way that traditional interviews simply cannot reach. Gamification enhances the assessment process and aligns candidates’ soft skills with the organization’s culture and requirements as well, and both candidates and recruiters benefit from gamification when evaluating soft skills.

Finding the perfect candidate for a job opening can be a challenge. To recruit the best talent for your organization, you can turn to external recruiting services like AC Lion. Contact us today to find the talent you need for your organization to flourish.