Welcome to the game: your next Employee Referral Program!

Don’t start to argue with me, I am sure that we all like to play games. Some just might love it more than others, but it is in our DNA to compete, play or learn either individually or together with others. You don’t agree with me? Well, here are three examples of well-known games that you might have played

Pokémon Go that drove the world (not only children but adults as well) crazy in summer 2016. In the game, players used a mobile device's GPS capability to locate, capture, battle, and train virtual creatures, called Pokémon, who appeared on the screen as if they were in the same real-world location as the player.

The Ice Bucket Challenge that was all over the Internet in Summer 2014 and that encouraged nominated participants to be filmed having a bucket of ice water poured on their heads and then nominated others to do the same. A common stipulation was that nominated participants had 24 hours to comply or forfeit by way of a charitable financial donation.

Or well known card game Solitaire that is one of the worlds biggest video game of all times.
I am sure that if you haven’t played any of these, you definitely have played those „like and share“game in Facebook.

What confuses me the most here is this: in case games and challenges are so popular then why we rarely use them in our HR processes? We do use them in sales, when we organize sales contests for our sales people or customer service employees. This way we are motivating our employees to sell more and reward those who sell the most or reach their goals.

So if we use it in sales, why not to use it in recruitment as well; since recruitment is sales? We, as recruiters, we are looking for potential candidates whom to sell the job.  Why not to use game mechanics here to create a recruitment games?

Work, including recruitment, doesn’t need to be serious. It could be fun as well, so let’s make it playful and use gamification to boost it! But how to do that? Well, for instance, let’s take employee referral program and turn it into game. To do that you need to:

- create a challenge: „recommend your friend to work“. Ask your employees to recommend their friends to work and count points for that. Then create a leaderboard where you are collecting the points of successful hires and/or recommendations. People like to compete and compare their achievements with others. Which means that to have a leaderboard is a must. So have the leaderboard publicly available either on your company intranet, display or mailing list (but you can also use a special app to do that).

- offer prizes. Though the purpose of the leaderboard is to encourage people to compare themselves with others and therefore make even more recommendations you should always have physical award to offer to winner(s). The grand prize depends of how the program is set: do you reward (pay recommendation bonus) for all successful hires or is the prize meant only for the winner. The award for the winner could be either bonus, iPad, family trip or something else that you know would encourage and motivate you employees to join your game and recommend their friends.

- prepare a communication plan. There are different channels that you could use here, starting from SMS and e-mail messages to your people and finishing with messages on digital screens in your office or closed Facebook group for your employees. Message that you are communicating could be written notes or documents, a short video that you have created for the program, a comics – or all three together or something else.

Welcome to the game!