Fixing The Recruiting Process Using Games And Big Data

Fixing The Recruiting Process Using Games And Big Data

This article originally appeared in Forbes

The recruiting process in most organizations around the world is fundamentally broken. No matter how many hours a prospective employee and employer sit together in a room asking and answering questions, going over brain teasers, and trying to assess each other for a good “cultural fit,” the problems still remain. The person doing the interviewing is always subject to their own biases about the candidate, the interview itself doesn’t give a good picture of the candidate or of the overall fit, the person being interviewed will respond with answers he/she things the employer want to here, and the overall experience for both parties is…sub par. In fact if recruiting were efficient then we would see fewer employees leaving organizations because they were the “wrong fit” and more employees being hired and staying at organizations because they were the “right fit.”

The sad reality is that today, it’s very difficult for organizations to be able to find the right person for the right job. A piece of paper and a series of interview questions is a weak technique at best. A recent finding from Bersin by Deloitte revealed that more than 70% of organizations cite “capability gaps” as one of their top five challenges. So what’s the solution? Over a year ago I profiled a company here called Knack which develops games for recruitment and talent management. These games are being used by organizations to evaluate if a potential candidate is a good fit. You can read the article I linked to above to learn more but basically these games look at hundreds of variables and use big data and analytics to learn about the person playing the game.