For many people it doesn’t seem all that long ago that graduate or apprentice recruitment processes involved heading to a company’s premises and sitting an individual test/exam or a paper-based verbal or numerical reasoning assessment before heading home and waiting to find out how you did, leaving the recruiters to manually mark your paper.
Technology is moving on a such a pace, like many people of my generation I had a mobile phone that had one game called snake and I built ringtones by typing on one musical note at a time. I now have a phone that has an app for EVERYTHING and I can sing along to whatever music I choose to make my ringer (sorry everyone). That’s just mobile phones, I haven’t even touched on drones, smart homes, tablets, kindles, automation and AI which are all the norm today. As little as 10 years ago they didn’t exist (or where they did the general public had little awareness of them).
What about deliveries? I ordered something on Amazon last week and it arrived the SAME DAY! My mind was blown.
The world is now a place where digital is everything and questions can be answered instantly, in this environment it is important that we keep pace. That’s why we’ve introduced Games Based Assessment into our recruitment process.
What is Games Based Assessment?
Game based assessment is a behavioural assessment which combines neuroscience, psychometrics and game technology to measure attributes relevant for success in various job roles. It combines traditional assessment methods with an engaging way of completing an assessment. This format helps candidates to feel more relaxed when completing the assessment in comparison to traditional psychometric measures.
How does it work?
The assessment consists of a series of tasks across various levels in an interactive interface. Each level has been specifically designed to capture how candidates go about tackling challenges, allowing recruiters to objectively measure how applicants naturally approach problems and react to changes in requirements, risk and uncertainty. These are all measured traits which directly correspond to behaviours in the workplace.
What gaming experience is required to complete the assessment?
No previous game-based experience is necessary to complete the assessment. Our game based assessment provider, Arctic Shores, have carefully designed each task for it to be intuitive and easy to pick up. They have also conducted extensive testing over the past few years which has shown that there is no difference in assessment performance in those highly experienced games, compared to those who have never played a mobile game before.
What happens after the assessment?
After the assessment candidates receive almost immediate feedback in the form of a detailed report outlining their areas of strengths and development. We then follow up shortly afterwards with an outcome and where applicable details about the next stages of our process.
Why did we make the change?
With a mobile ready application process at WSP we are allowing our candidates to apply and complete the first stages of our assessment digitally, introducing new technologies allows us to reduce the selection time for our candidates, eliminates unconscious bias and gives full and open feedback to our candidates.
It’s great to work for an innovative and future ready organisation that is open to exploring new solutions and I am excited to see what the next innovations in recruitment will be!
