When was the last time you applied for a job? Whether last month or all the way back in the early 2000s, applying for a job usually entails polishing your CV and cobbling together a cover letter. If you are unlucky, the recruitment website asks you to fill in all your details into an online mask that looks straight out of 1997 and wants to know the exact date you graduated high school. The ninth circle of hell is a recruitment website.

It doesn't have to be this way. Applying for the job can be like a game where everybody wins – if recruiters are willing to try gamification.

Gamification is a fantastic tool to attract and retain talent. 55% of US workers want to work for a company that uses gamification. Read on to discover why that is the case and how you can use gamification to attract and retain talent.

A Quick Recap: Gamification

Let's quickly go over the most common gamification features before we dive into their use for HR:

• Leaderboards: create friendly competition and can measure learning outcomes
• Points and badges: are quick ways to reward and recognise achievements
• Storytelling: can be used to engage, invest and immerse audiences
• Microlearning: helps learners to retain difficult or complex material
• Social features: increase collaboration and company culture
• Challenges: keep users engaged and motivated

Overall, gamification increases motivation and engagement, builds cohesive teams, rewards users, and makes learning more effective and sustainable. If you are interested in a deep dive into how gamification works, check out our blog post on the science behind gamification.

Attracting And Onboarding Top Talent with Gamification

The often clunky application processes that many of us have faced at one point in our lives are all the more surprising if you consider that hiring talent is increasingly difficult. According to McKinsey, a profound mismatch exists between companies' need for talent and the number of employees willing to supply it. In short, there are more jobs than qualified applicants.

Even if a company manages to hire its dream candidate, they are less likely to stay. 30% of job seekers have left a job within 90 days of starting, with women more likely to go than men. 40% of workers in the US consider quitting within the next months. High turnover is not only bad for morale, it's also costly. Every year, companies in the US lose $11 billion due to employee turnover.

What if applying for a job could be fun, not a daunting task lurking at the bottom of your to-do list? Let's see what this could look like: A couple of years ago, the food giant Pepsi Co. created the Dare To Do More Challenge, an interactive game designed to attract talent. By doing quizzes, playing a version of fruit ninja, or a branded game of pairs, candidates could create a portfolio of themselves, learn more about their prospective employer, and generate a positive relationship with the brand. The initiative was a success. Around 500 users had created profiles on the Pepsi Co App within two months.

Hackathons, events where people engineer a project collaboratively over a limited timeframe, are equally popular within the IT sector and can be easily gamified with points and leaderboards.

To use existing talent for recruiting, Betterworks created a system whereby employees get points for each recruit they refer to the company. The points can then be redeemed for prizes.

Once companies have attracted talent, they have to ensure that the onboarding process is smooth. A bad onboarding experience can lead to decreased productivity and job satisfaction. US companies do a relatively poor job onboarding their employees. Two-thirds of remote workers and almost 40% of hybrid and on-site employees describe their onboarding as confusing and boring.

Gamification to the rescue! Companies that use gamified onboarding increase employee engagement by almost 50% and significantly reduce turnover. A gamified onboarding can also transmit more information in a shorter time, getting people ready to work quicker and more effectively.

So how can you gamify your onboarding? Use micro lessons and storytelling to ensure that employees retain information. Points and leaderboards create a sense of achievement and friendly competition. Rewards make people feel appreciated.

Retaining Talent through Gamification

Once you have your star employees, you need to keep them. Gamification can help you. A survey found that almost 70% of employees are willing to stay longer with their company if they incorporate gamification into their business practices, and nearly 90% say gamification makes them happier at work.

Workplace happiness is complex, with many factors such as work-life balance, supervisor relations, team culture, salary and benefits, and job characteristics intertwined. Gamification can tackle most of these issues.

For instance, the wood preserving company Cal Preserving, Inc. used gamification to help employees manage their retirement plans, decreasing the financial stress of their staff and increasing their loyalty and job satisfaction.

In Japan, Nintendo and McDonalds teamed up to create training lessons for employees that were fun and effective, reducing training time and increasing employee happiness.

The online retailer Zappos used gamification to improve team culture. Whenever an employee logged into their account, they were shown a picture of a colleague. They were encouraged to email them and set up a coffee date if they couldn't recognise them.

Walmart created a computer game to test and solidify employees' knowledge of safety measures. It was a massive success, with 96% of employees implementing their knowledge daily.

Humans are social creatures that gravitate towards fun and rewards. Gamification taps into our desire for enjoyment and community. Almost everything can be turned into a productive game.

Read on to learn how to implement gamification to attract your favourite new employees and keep them happy.

How to Implement Gamification to Attract and Retain Talent

Don't think of gamification as fancy apps and months-long corporate campaigns – these initiatives exist, but gamification can be much simpler and still be just as effective.

Let's take a look at these five steps to implement gamification.

1. Have a Strategy

It might be tempting to create a leaderboard and points system and see where this takes you, but without strategy and intent, this risks wasting time and resources.

You need to know why you employ gamification, your goals, and how to measure impact before implementing any gamification initiatives. Know what your employees need and want, how to communicate effectively with them, and what will motivate and engage them most. This will help you align the gamification elements with your overall goals.

2. Keep it fair!

Ensure that the gamification elements are fair and accessible to all employees, regardless of their skill level or tech-savviness. Help everyone to understand (a) why they play, (b) how to play, and (c) the goals of the initiative. If needed, repeat rules and goals frequently.

3. Communicate and Reward

A study has shown that almost 80% of employees value immediate feedback. Gamified onboardings or trainings are a fantastic way to provide instant and measurable feedback. You can either automatise feedback by, for example, sending an automatic announcement when users hit a particular milestone or using social features such as messages. Gamification usually generates a wealth of data as well so that you can ensure your feedback is fair and to the point.

4. Measure and Analyse Results

Ideally, you created key performance indicators when implementing your gamification initiative to measure its success. Track employee progress throughout the training, recruitment or onboarding session. You can use this data to reward them, identify areas of improvement, and adjust your strategy. Conduct surveys into the effectiveness of your initiatives, keep an eye on user data in the backend, and track adoption rates.

Don't turn into a Big Brother! Gamification is not a tool to exert control over employees. Ensure you're transparent about your data tracking and don't track unnecessary data.

5. Keep it simple

Don't overcomplicate it. Nobody likes games that come with 100 pages of instructions. Keep in mind that, most likely, not all your employees are tech-savvy. Your gamification initiative will be successful if it's easy to understand and access. Focus on providing a fun and social experience.

Gamification is not a one size fits all solution, but with the right strategy behind it, the results are astonishing.

The fight for the best talent will only become more intense. Already, companies are losing serious money because they can't find or retain employees. By implementing gamification in your HR cycle – for recruiting, onboarding, training, or social aspects – you can ensure that you find and keep the right people and that your staff is motivated.