Understanding Gamification – How Leading Brands Are Using Gamification for Employee Engagement and Hiring

This is a follow-up on our series on Understanding Gamification. You can click here to read part 1 and part 2.

India has been setting the trend of using gamification more like an internal tool of participation/engagement amongst employees. Organizations have been using gamification for induction, employee engagement et al.

The gamification method happens to be one of the cost effective methods for employee engagement and hiring processes as there are no traveling costs or training costs involved. It’s a one time cost thing.

When one designs a gamification process, people tend to learn things in an interesting and engaging manner. Sources have it that ‘Gamification’ technique increases employee learning ability by 40 percent.

A few examples from the Indian market-

ISB (Hyderabad) :

The objective for the college was to reach out to thousands of ISB alumni on the occasion of their 10th anniversary celebration. The game was about a hot air balloon race wherein the participants would get a chance to interact with one another whilst learning about the institutional updates and trivia.

Almost all the features (badges, rewards, points, leader board) of gamification were utilized in the same.

HCL India :

How would it feel if an organization could predict which interviewees would join them and which ones wouldn't.

Thanks to gamification, HCL could predict with up to 95 percent accuracy as to whether a person would join them or not after the interview. HCl pioneered the concept of lateral hiring so as to analyze the ability of potential candidates.

Their reason behind it - Since, youngsters nowadays have a tendency to change their mind within a very short duration of time, they tend to be less motivated about anything which is not fun!

According to them, there’s a possibility that even when a person gets an offer letter from the organization, there’s always a 20-25 percent gap in the no. of offers made and it finally being accepted.

Thanks to the gamification tools, the organization could predict whether a person would join them or not.

This was done with the help of a monopoly game which the potential candidate had to play, based on his/he behavior in the game the company could figure out the skills, attributes and their intention to join.

Make My Trip :

Mind tickle, one of the leading Gamification players in India, helped MMT design an engaging training program, wherein the new hire was given a pair of headset and asked to play the game. The idea was to make him/her acquainted with the culture/values of the organization in an effective manner.

Accenture’s Path to Success:

Accenture’s Path to Success Facebook app was a great way to find and engage potential talent in the industry. The quiz based format tested the aptitude of the users while keeping them engaged in an interesting gameplay. Users had to roll the dice to land on a tile and they were faced with a trivia question and rewarded for each correct answer while they climbed up the corporate ladder.

And the data collected through this game helped them build a pipeline of talent whom they can reach out to as and when required.

Loreal :

Wanna get hired at Loreal? All you gotta do is simply PLAY a GAME! Loreal had launched a business game ‘REVEAL’ across different countries.The objective of the game was to get selected either for an internship or a full time job. The whole idea of the game was around a Loreal Product Launch

Players had to participate in the life cycle of the product. Right from the production to marketing/sales of that product. Analyzing the situations and taking the right decisions. The players got exposure to Loreal’s culture and values via this game. It also helped the players to decide their career options- as in, what field they were most likely to join in!

However, at the same time, gamification in India is still at the nascent stage. Many organizations still need convincing that gamification is indeed a cost effective ’marketing tool’.

According to Gartner, by 2014 more than 70 percent of Forbes Global 2000 organizations will have at least one games-based application, by 2015, half of all companies that manage innovation processes will have “gamified” them, and that by 2015 over 50 percent of organizations will be using gamification to engage employees.