Campus placements: Companies use game-based assessments to hire candidates
Firms are asking students to play mobile games to assess their behaviour and cognitive abilities
Hiring a campus candidate using old methods of aptitude assessment is a thing of the past for some companies. Instead, they are asking students to play mobile games to assess their behaviour and cognitive abilities.
This year, students were pleasantly surprised to find mobile games becoming a part of the recruitment process.
Twenty-nine-year-old Shourya Saxena, who holds a master of business administration (MBA) degree from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, was surprised when he was asked to play a mobile role-playing game during his assessment round. In the game, Saxena was the protagonist of a story, who had to interact with other characters and manoeuvre through challenges.
“It was very interesting. I could relate to the characters and the situations seemed far more contextual and immersive than all those questionnaires we answer, in which all we think of is what answer would make us look good,” said Saxena, who will soon be working with Keva, a fragrance and flavours company headquartered in Mumbai.
This year, companies such as Ashok Leyland and Total India partnered with Talent Litmus, a platform for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven game-based assessments and learning, for their campus recruitment process.
“These assessments gave us a data-driven approach to understand a candidate’s mindset, something that is largely subjective. The game employed behavioural science and neurocognitive models, allowing us to map and assess the candidates better,” said Uma Rao, vice president and human resource (HR) representative of Ashok Leyland. “Students wrote to us saying they actually enjoyed the recruitment process instead of dreading it.”
Satpreet Arora, the co-founder of Talent Litmus, said, “A short duration of gameplay can be a rich source of data on an individual, which can be analysed through established theories of applied psychology to generate reliable insights into the competencies of the individual.”
HR professionals believe game-based assessments during placements will be the norm, especially in engineering institutes.
“Game-based assessment is an interesting way of doing things with higher levels of engagement. This process shows a candidate’s natural ability and gives us an insight into their understanding of certain concepts,” said Indrajit Chatterjee, executive vice president and chief HR officer of Keva.