Why Games are the Future of Talent Assessments [Webinar Recap]

This week, we hosted a two-part webinar series around a key element of the future of talent assessments: game-based assessments. In this series, HireVue’s Clemens Aichholzer explored how game-based assessments can quantify candidates’ soft and hard skills — with scientific rigor.

Clemens started with an overview of the four competency domains that HireVue uses when designing assessments. Called the HireVue competency library, the domains are:

• Work with people
• Personality and work style
• Work with information
• Technical skills

Games Add to a Comprehensive View of Candidates

Games play a critical role in comprehensive assessment. While historically game-based assessments were only used to measure cognitive ability (something they do very well), today’s advanced games can also quantify “softer” competencies, like emotional intelligence and persistence.

While games alone do an excellent job of quantifying competencies, they reach their fullest potential when combined with a video-based assessment. The combined approach is quick and engaging for candidates, while giving hiring teams crucial insight into the competencies that lead to success on the job. Insights that can be gleaned quickly to allow hiring teams to assess more candidates in a shorter amount of time.

This offers your organization a modular approach to screening candidates — where assessments are uniquely built around which competencies lead to success in a specific job.

You can see an illustration of what this combined approach looks like below:

For example, in the sales representative (shown above) assessment, candidates respond to four OnDemand interview questions (which are evaluated with AI as a video-based assessment) and complete two short games. The assessment screens candidates for critical skills for a sales representative that include:

• Communication. How well candidates communicate and tailor their messages to unique audiences.
• Negotiation and persuasion. How well candidates work with others to produce agreement on a course of action or on outcomes that satisfy various interests.
• Personal stability. How well candidates remain controlled in the face of pressure, complaints, or failure and if they can have haves the ability to think rationally under despite pressures.
• Drive for results and initiative. How well candidates continually strive to exceed goals or improve performance.
• Problem- solving. How well candidates identify and analyze problems, determine causative factors, and finds solutions to them.
• Cognitive ability. How well candidates work with, process, and incorporate information, especially new information.

In contrast, an assessment for a non-sales role may not need to screen for negotiation and persuasion, so a different set of competencies would be screened for.

Games Benefit Candidates and Recruiters

Regardless of what a candidate is assessed for, with all HireVue Assessments, when the candidate finishes the assessment, he/she receives feedback and development tips. So, even those who don’t progress to the next round of the hiring funnel get something in return for their time and have a more positive candidate experience.

Recruiting teams, on the other hand, get insight into each candidate’s job-relevant competencies.

A Tailored Gaming Experience

All in all, HireVue currently offers 17 different game-based assessments that can be used alone or in combination with a video-based assessment. And more HireVue Game-Based Assessments are in development.

Each HireVue Game-Based Assessment measures a different aspect of cognitive ability or job-related competency. Games also vary in their “game-ness” — some are more playful, and reminiscent of the puzzle games you might find on someone’s smartphone; others are more utilitarian and reminiscent of cognitive tests.

A complete game-based assessment (comprised of multiple games) can be tailored to the candidate experience you want to provide. For example, if you’re using games to assess candidates for more senior roles, you can choose a series of games with a highly professional feel. If you’re using games to assess candidates for entry-level roles, you can choose games with a more mobile-game feel.

HireVue’s team of IO psychologists work with each customer to choose the game combination that measures the right set of job-relevant competencies and is optimized for the candidate experience you want to provide.

Clemens continued with an example of a UK retailer using game-based assessments for high-volume, graduate recruiting. This particular retailer receives more than 20,000 applicants for its graduate roles each year.

The retailer uses a staged hiring process, where game-based assessments are the first step. This lets the organization consider more candidates than if they were manually (or automatically) screening resumes or applications. Candidates who perform well on the game-based assessment are invited to a follow-up video-based assessment. From there, the strongest 200 candidates are interviewed at an on-site assessment center, 100 of which ultimately receive job offers.

Game-based assessments are quicker, more engaging, and just as effective and valid as traditional employment testing.

Watch the Full Webinar

Watch the full webinar series to learn how HireVue Game-Based Assessments are validated, and how you can use them to uncover the best talent, faster.