Case Study: Gamifying a Better Assessment
ManpowerGroup and HireVue leverage their combined strengths in assessments and gaming to develop a modern assessment that improves speed and accuracy with an enhanced candidate experience.
Business Issue
Many large employers use pre-hire assessments – often because well-designed assessments provide a better way to understand fit. For example, a structured interview offers a 50 percent chance of hiring a good fit. When an assessment is added, the odds increase to 80 percent. Assessments help individuals understand what jobs/careers may be a good fit, while also providing a path for their skills development. Not all assessments, however, provide an engaging user experience. Lengthy, paper-based assessments – sometimes with hundreds of questions – provide a poor candidate experience and often require accredited providers to accurately interpret the results. Even with digital assessments, the candidate experience can suffer if assessments are poorly structured or have barriers to access, such as broken links, unnecessarily long content or are otherwise difficult to use.
ManpowerGroup sought to be more strategic in how data and insights are leveraged to improve job matching capabilities while also increasing the number of assessments taken through an enhanced user experience. To accomplish these objectives, assessment takers needed to be provided with immediate, common-language feedback and a shorter experience while also integrating gamification best practices (e.g., modules that are short, interactive, immersive, fast-paced and adaptive), where appropriate. A partner who could co-create gamified experiences was needed to develop scientifically validated, scalable assessments.
Solution
Leveraging the insights from the field of industrial-organizational psychology combined with the use of state-of-the-art AI, modern digital technology applications and continuous proprietary research and innovation, ManpowerGroup selected MindX (acquired by HireVue, a leader in AI video interviewing) to use their expertise to create a scientifically validated, mobile-first gamified assessment that would be more engaging, especially for younger candidates. Importantly, the gamified assessment was also demonstrated to be fair and unbiased, not unfairly discriminating against ethnicity, gender or age and, therefore, promoting diversity.
HireVue’s game-based psychometric tool, designed to measure cognitive ability, dynamically adapts to candidate performance, increasing in complexity as items get answered correctly and becoming simpler if mistakes are made. HireVue’s assessment was embedded in ManpowerGroup’s employability assessment, SkillsInSight, a 10-minute (38 question) assessment screen for characteristics predictive of workplace success. The multiple-choice questions are followed by HireVue’s cognitive game. The assessment provides insights into an individual’s likelihood of success in the workplace in three key areas: likeability (e.g., friendly, cooperative and rewarding to work with), ability (e.g., high capacity to solve problems and think critically) and drive (e.g., organized, motivated and goal-oriented). The tool provides real-time feedback on how users can improve. Candidates routinely cite the importance of real-time feedback in their experience, so this is a critical aspect of the assessment.
By including the interactive HireVue cognitive game, the number of behavioral and performance data points collected for each candidate increases. For example, the HireVue game uses machine learning to better understand the types of complex activities the candidate is able to handle and with what degree of accuracy they are able to do so. It also takes into account the speed/quickness of decision making and infers whether any mistakes made are due to a lack of attention /detail orientation or the increased difficulty of the underlying challenges. The tool delivers an improved candidate experience that minimizes the anxiety associated with traditional assessments. Because it is short and engaging, drop-off is minimized. Lastly, personalized, instant feedback is available to the candidate upon completing the assessment.
Because the SkillsInSight is built on a cloud-based platform, data collected from each part of the assessment is used to continuously iterate and improve the product. HireVue’s robust team of around 20 occupational psychologists on staff along with data scientists, artificial intelligence and HR experts, collect and analyze assessment data, transforming it into actionable insights to further improve and finetune the scientific game. This continuous learning approach will increase the accuracy of the assessment—driven by data and technology.
Results
SkillsInSight has proven to be a valuable assessment tool for organizations and an engaging experience for assessment takers. Select results include the following:
- More than 30,000 assessments have been completed since the product’s launch in September 2018.
- SkillsInSight is available in five languages (Dutch, English, French, Italian and Spanish) and serves as a critical input to MyPath®, which enables people to access jobs and grow in in-demand careers, by providing personalized career paths, guidance, learning programs, upskilling opportunities and practical on-the-job training so that they can achieve more.
- SkillsInSight supports talent decisions, including hiring and development, and improves employee mobility by assisting Talent Agents to align capabilities and potential to new roles.
- Based on the customization and scalability of the assessment, the Mexican government’s Ministry of Labor has begun to deploy the SkillsInSight tool to approximately one million young professionals in Mexico.