Is the CV dead? How games are revolutionising the jobs market

A pixelated coral reef fills the screen. A drop-down menu lists a variety of weird and wonderful sea creatures – brain coral, turtles, seaweed – along with their preferred temperature, salt content and food sources. The aim of the game is to build a healthy ecosystem, using this information to pick the right predators and prey to co-exist in a colourful ocean simulation.

But this is no Nintendo playpen. The “build a reef” scenario is part of the McKinsey Problem Solving Game – a state of the art digital assessment designed to filter would-be consultants in the firm’s highly competitive application process (notoriously, only about 1 per cent of all applicants receive job offers). According to McKinsey, the game helps to “measure a broad set of cognitive skills” and provide an insight “beyond the resumé or conventional interview”.

McKinsey isn’t alone in adopting recruitment “gamification”. The practice of encouraging applicants to engage in game-like behaviours and situations during the hiring process has gained popularity in recent years, and even more so during the pandemic.

A survey by the Institute for Student Employers (ISE) showed that just 30 per cent of UK companies used face-to-face interviews in the first stage of graduate recruitment last year. Psychometric tests were used by 59 per cent and gamified assessments by 10 per cent. Often, gamification and psychometric tests are used to supplement CVs, but sometimes they are used as standalone processes to filter candidates for final stage interviews.

It’s easy to see why employers are keen to digitise the recruitment process. During the pandemic, the already crowded field of graduate jobs became saturated, with hundreds of applicants often applying for a single entry-level position. One company reported receiving over 4,000 applications for an entry-level paralegal role.

With this volume of interest, Amit Joshi, professor of AI, analytics and marketing strategy at IMD Business School, points out that gamified recruitment comes into its own. “Even if you strip out everything else, just the efficiency argument itself is very powerful,” he says.

But there are other benefits. “What organisations have now started to find is that efficiency is only one side of the coin. What companies are seeing is that they are hiring different people at the end of the process… which is a good thing.”

Joshi gives the example of a firm which used gamified tests to hire a data scientist. Typically, a company would look for a candidate with a mathematics, statistics or engineering background on their CV. But using a set of online assessments, the company found that philosophy majors were trained to be very analytical in their thinking.

“A philosophy major probably isn’t going to come in and know how to code in Python, but we can teach that in a month… it’s the analytical thought process we want,” he says.

Another benefit of gamified recruitment is that it guards against the issue of candidates lying on their CVs – something that almost 40 per cent of UK employees have done at some stage in their professional career, according to a recent survey.

Jan Tegze founded Sourcingtest.online to provide recruiters and talent sourcers with online games that can be used to assess applicants during the hiring process. “If you have hundreds of people who are sourcers and recruiters and you ask them ‘Do you know how to source people?’ – all of them will tell you yes,” he says. “But if you give them a practical test, you will quickly find out if they really know how to source people and evaluate their knowledge.”

As well as providing major upsides for the company, online assessments can also be beneficial for applicants. A recent survey by Arctic Shores, which creates behaviour-based assessments for recruiters, found that only seven per cent of companies are managing to give feedback to all candidates during the pandemic. Robert Newry, CEO and co-founder of Arctic Shores, says that the company’s assessments make it easier to give applicants meaningful results.

“Whenever you ask somebody to do an activity as part of a recruitment process… the initial thought is – ‘did I do well?’ – and of course, the answer is that you can’t do well or badly. This is an assessment of what your strengths are, and how well they aligned to what is needed in the business,” he says. Instead, Arctic Shores gives feedback on which tasks candidates naturally lean towards, the skills they would feel most comfortable using in a job, as well as those they are less inclined towards.

Another challenge facing recruiters is the issue of how best to tackle systematic bias in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. While “gamification” might seem like a simple solution, Joshi warns that the technology needs to be handled carefully. “You might think that you’re addressing bias, but just taking a process that you do in the face-to-face world and making it digital does not automatically get rid of bias,” he says.

Joshi says that while there are some “incredibly smart” startups doing positive work around hiring diversity, firms need to be wary of “pseudoscience” companies that claim to predict the teamwork capabilities and emotional skills of a candidate by analysing a video interview. “There is no scientific evidence that you can do that on the basis of even a 30-minute call,” he says.

Companies also need to be wary of candidates trying to hack the system. Attempts to get around online recruitment processes range from the more benign – Reddit and Student Room threads offering free tips – to expensive coaching packages that boast detailed instructions of how to beat specific tests.

But for those companies which have introduced thoughtful online assessments into their hiring processes, the benefits are already becoming apparent.

Arctic Shores recently worked with the outsourcing firm Capita to hire apprentices for its government Kickstart initiative. Capita scrapped CVs, and instead used Arctic Shores’ behaviour assessments for shortlisting interview candidates based on factors such as agility, resilience, determination and self-discipline.

Newry says that the process resulted in the hiring of one candidate who was severely dyslexic, and another who was not a native English speaker. Traditional assessments may have hindered these candidates, but Newry says that they are now flourishing on the scheme because they were able to demonstrate that they had the right skills through the online assessments.

So is the CV dead? At the moment, gamification processes are mostly used for recent graduates, but Newry says the practice is becoming more widespread. “There’s some change that’s happened in the marketplace. Diversity and inclusion have become really important, so people are now looking at how to recruit more for soft skills,” he says. “Companies are also recruiting a lot more for culture…it’s really broadening out.”

Meanwhile, Joshi has a hunch that the CV’s days are numbered. “Eventually, somebody smart will figure it out and say: ‘Hey, between your Facebook profile, LinkedIn profile and some other things out there, I can form a pretty solid picture of who you are. I really don’t need your CV to do this’…. but I don’t think we’re there yet.”