Gamification in recruitment is the tech version of internal competition. A theme that’s been central to the sector for decades.
Since the first recruitment offices came into existence, Sales boards were used to pitch billers against one another in the spirit of friendly competition.
It’s a theme that still holds true. From Grad hire to Management, competition ekes out the best in teams. It drives performance, instils a strong work ethic and ensures high activity from each and every recruiter.
But where manual competitions fall short, automated gamification picks up the pieces.
According to Mambo.io, approximately 90% of employees report an increase in productivity after gamification’s been introduced. And not only that, those findings say gamification also resulted in an 89% surge in employee happiness.
“Gamification is the best feature. If we have a short or long term goal, it’s a great way of uniting the entire team around it.”
Craig L. Recruitment Partner and OneUP Customer
To put it plainly, gamification in recruitment takes the principle of competition and removes the admin. And not only is it easier to measure than having someone manually record activities, but can be completely tailored to the needs of your business or team.
Gamification can give your team rapid feedback, without having to wait for reviews or manual reports. It increases team competition. It levels the playing field by offering a clear set of rules for those competing.
You’ll already have goal-oriented challenges, but with gamification you can level them up. Tailoring them strategically to the goals of the individual recruiter, and their stance in the market compared to others.
There’s integration with training goals, and perhaps most importantly, the freedom to fail.
Why is the freedom to fail important? Because it unlocks a willingness to try. Failure in business is regularly heralded as one of the most crucial elements to success. Small, regular failures that set a precedent of repeated effort in new areas.
And when a recruiter’s scared of failure, that desire to try new things wanes. They rely on old practices that potentially aren’t working.
Give your recruiters the freedom to fail, and the patience when they do, and they’ll almost certainly find success more quickly.
Where can gamification inspire success?
Gamification can inspire the recruiters in your business in a number of ways. In fact, it can fire up your team across the entire life cycle of a recruitment process.
But it’s only effective once you know where activity leads to genuine results.
As an example, many in the industry are struggling with business development currently. Given the job-led weighting the vast majority of businesses now find themselves in, there’s simply fewer jobs to go round, and therefore more competition for business.
If you can pinpoint activities which open new accounts and develop current clients, you know what you should be measuring.
You’ll be familiar with the adage “if you can measure it, you can improve it.”
Let’s say you analyse activity which brings in new business, and find it’s actually “meetings booked” which is a bigger catalyst for new business, than “calls made”.
This measurement is crucial to gamifying the right activities and improving your metrics.
With gamification, you can incentivise consultants to increase the right activities and set the tone of competition around strategy. Not endlessly ticking off KPIs as an admin obligation before the week’s out.
And there’s no limit to what you can gamify.
Things like:
- BD activity, such as call/email volumes
- Team collaboration
- Revenue, placements and other KPIs
- Target attainment
- Hiring processes
- Candidate experience
- Candidate screening
- Skill assessments
- Interviewing
- Employee referral
- Successful onboarding
If, for example, you’re not struggling for business currently, but find your brand isn’t having the positive reaction in the market you’d hope, and therefore might be losing candidates to other companies, then candidate experience should be top of your list.
No two recruitment companies are the same when it comes to ability, brand and leadership.
But gamification’s versatility in adapting to your specific challenges is what will tailor both your experience and success.
“Though, as the majority of those in sales are competitive, the gamification of OneUp's services means teams and wider people in the business can all get involved in mini games/competitions.”
Curtis M. Senior Recruitment Consultant and OneUp Customer
Knowledge is power
Buy any new car from a showroom in 2025 and you’ll find a heads up display projecting on the windshield in front of you with critical information to help you drive more effectively.
You’ll know your speed, the speed limit of the road you’re on and immediate navigation information.
It’s not like this information wasn’t available in previous cars, just that the driver had to divert their attention in order to get it. It might only save a little bit of time. But when you’re driving a high-performance engine, be it a car or a recruitment business, visibility makes the journey all the smoother.
The best gamification systems take this premise and adapt it to recruitment.
Which is why office TVs are effective at taking competition up a notch.
They broadcast wins, offer live leaderboards, mission progress and league standings.
They offer clearer visibility. A chance to see the roadmap of team competition, without your recruiters having to divert their attention, wasting precious time when they could be overtaking those in the slow lane.
Gamification on TVs helps make your recruiters’ business a high-performance engine, with minimal distraction.
“We love the Slideshow, which we have running on the office TV all day! We use it for friendly competitions, incentives, tracking daily activity, motivational messages and more!”
Loren B. OneUp Customer.
The potential pitfalls of gamification
Like anything in life, there are positives and negatives to the gamification of recruitment activity. If the wrong elements are benchmarked, consultants can quickly feel as though they’re “KPIs for KPI’s sake.”
Often, when activity is merely measured, without relevance to the market, this happens.
Should a recruiter working a Trades and Labour desk have the same KPIs as a consultant placing Creatives? Almost certainly not.
Should contract and perm recruiters working the same market have the same KPIs? Possibly. Possibly not.
The truth is, it depends on the activities needed to run their individual desk. You might even argue, two perm recruiters working the same market, in the exact same niche, but with different tenures in the industry shouldn’t be benchmarked in the same way.
One might have 10 long-standing clients that bring in enough work every month. The other might be building their client list and need a higher focus on new business.
And this is where automated gamification makes sense.
You can set head-to-head challenges between consultants
You can create leagues based on specific metrics.
You can even set team missions to achieve larger targets, like quarterly revenue goals. This makes the competition a team event.
Gamification turns KPIs from daunting targets into a challenge that’s exciting, fun and interactive. It erodes any chance of having KPIs for KPI’s sake. And makes every consultant in your business feel as though there’s a strategic focus to their effort.
It even makes commission easier to achieve for each recruiter, because they’ll see clearer value in the work they produce.
It’s competition, just… strategic, and working for the benefit of the people you employ. Which, coincidentally, benefits you too.
How quickly can gamification work?
Immediately.
“We’ve already seen ROI, as since launching OneUp and competitions our Revenue Booked has increased.”
Straight from the mouth of a OneUp customer who saw immediate results from implementing gamification.
And they’re not the only ones.
Another OneUp customer set up leagues for different areas of their business, based on 3 metrics. They had a league announcement at the start, a celebration at the end, and all metrics displayed on their TVs.
Comparing the data from the week before, activity doubled for 2 of the metrics and almost doubled for the other. In fact, in just one day, they saw an 86% increase in candidate calls and 1.5x the client calls.
Try before you buy
Contingent recruitment has been the mainstay of the industry for some time.
It gives clients the ability to make sure standards are of the quality they desire. That new hires are made and the services they pay for, are worth it.
Lawyers offer the same deal. “No Win, No Fee” protects the claimant and ensures they’re not out of pocket for results which go against them.
And software’s followed suit. Amazon Prime, Deliveroo, Microsoft… all the tools you use in your everyday life have a period of trial before they ask for regular payment. This puts you in the driving seat. If you don’t see value, there’s no ill-feeling and on you go.
Now, we’re offering the same thing. A 28-day trial of OneUp to show you the immediate benefit you can get by instilling gamification in your recruitment business.
To see what you could do in 28 days, with no obligation, your ticket to ride is right here.
There’s no obligation, just a risk-free trial to demonstrate exactly how OneUp can improve your recruitment business from the inside out. In fact, our platform works so well 8,000+ recruiters use it every single day.
You’ll get the benefit of implementing strategy into your targets, with the removal of tiresome admin, increasing productivity for your team. It’s a no-brainer for us in giving you the keys for a test drive.
Who knows? It might be the best, most strategic decision you make this year.
