Why serious games are today’s candidate assessment tool

The business environment has evolved tremendously in the recent past. Digitalisation has rewritten business models, value chains and consumer habits. These changes also mean that work and operating models too are different from what they used to be.

Enhanced and unpredictable competition and lower entry barriers into markets mean that organisations need to adapt to a constantly changing environment.

In a way, work itself resembles more and more projects and teams need to be both knowledgeable and efficient, fast. Finding resources, who will have the right experience and demonstrate the behaviours, which will ensure that the team delivers a peak performance are therefore critical for success.

In this context, traditional recruiting and selection methods may not provide enough of the relevant insights to assemble a winning team. Indeed, they tend to focus on the individual rather than on how people in their roles will maximise the team’s potential.

Today’s business world requires abilities such as managing conflicting priorities, working outside one’s comfort zone, solving complex problems, being able to challenge traditional thinking and assumptions, high customer-centricity, working under stress, in distributed teams, with people of different backgrounds, status and motivations, which you often don’t know.

Team compositions are not often being looked at from the human relationships and behavioural perspective, on top of the usual competency angle. In an era, where value creation and realisation is so dependent on getting the most out of our human capital, it is a mistake, through which a lot of value is potentially left on the table.

One way to address the human side of project teams, when selecting the right talents for the challenge at hand, is to recreate situations calling upon the skills, which are expected to be required in the team that is being assembled to meet its objective. To do so, serious games are the ideal tool.

They are like the modern version of the well-known “in tray” exercises used in many candidate assessments, but this time, candidates will need to work collaboratively to achieve their team objective and it is possible to observe how they deal with the task, organise themselves and work with each other. Various behavioural lenses, such as Belbin for example, can be superimposed onto the observations to couple them with existing reference frameworks, if required.

This approach presents two main advantages: it is based on relevant business situations and it reveals how people actually work, when confronted with them.

At ALL4ONE consulting, we have created business games based on ocean races for the many similarities between sailing and managing a business. Sailing-based serious games also enable to craft many scenarios based on real “business cases”, whilst taking participants out of their comfort zone, in a rapidly changing environment.

We are currently looking for HR and recruitment specialists interested in using serious games for candidates assessment and selection.

Interested? Get in touch: [email protected]