Neuroscientific games are relatively new in a hiring setting, developed to improve the value people get out of assessing potential hires. We have chosen to work with neuroscientific games instead of traditional assessments like personality questionnaires, for the following four reasons.
Social desirability
Gamified assessments are tailored to calculate a person’s individual abilities and behaviour. Based on this calculation, the game solely presents items that are fitting to the person’s abilities and behaviours. Personality questionnaires, in contrast to games, present all possible items to the individual, which enables people to decode and identify socially desirable results.
Stimulated behaviour
Gamified assessments create an environment and atmosphere that directs a person’s attention away from the feeling of being assessed, thus reducing anxiety and contributing to more unconscious behaviours.
Cultural bias
Gamified assessments reduce cultural bias in two ways:
In traditional tests, much text is often used. Words can be interpreted differently based on your cultural background. Personality questionnaires can therefore be wrongly interpreted when not taking cultural differences into account. Gamified assessments limit the usage of text.
As mentioned above, social desirability is much easier to achieve in traditional tests. Social desirable behaviour, however, is different for different cultures. For example, workplace behaviour and hierarchy can vary significantly, based on the cultural roots of a company. Therefore, people with different cultural backgrounds will likely provide different socially desirable answers.
Experience
Gamified assessments are more attractive and consequently more enjoyable to take part in than traditional assessments. What's important to keep in mind here though, is that the experience of gamified assessments should not be compared to the experience of gaming itself. Its experience should be compared to the experience of a traditional job application procedure.