The Recruiting Game

Effective recruiting remains one of the crown jewels of the human resource experience. And even with all the tech-driven bells and whistles applied to the function over the past 10 to 15 years, HR and recruiting leaders are still looking for better approaches to landing top talent.

Along those lines, an emerging wave of companies is making some strong claims about their abilities to make recruiting and screening more effective. Some have applicants playing virtual games; others use a data-rich form of pre-hire assessment testing. Some offer a combination of both games and testing. While the tools and companies may differ, they all rely on metrics, analytics and algorithms fueled by big data. The claim is that, by using these new tools, employers will -- at long last -- put the best possible people in their organizations' seats.

Companies such as Knack, Evolv, CubeConnect, Prophesy Sciences, Smarterer and a host of others have been gaining notoriety in the mainstream business press by saying their products and services can get employers as close to recruiting perfection as possible. To do that, they also share a "Moneyball-like" approach, the metrics-driven methodology used successfully by Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane and popularized in the film Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as Beane.

Knack founder and CEO Guy Halfteck, an Israeli entrepreneur, is not shy about making predictions for this latest iteration of recruiting's silver bullet. In a way, he speaks for all the innovators behind this movement.

"The current recruiting continuum eventually will be obsolete," says Halfteck, a former attorney who built Knack after undergoing a frustrating career-change experience. "We are not offering a new incremental innovation on an existing assessment tool. We offer a better tool, a more strategic tool for companies to build their next-generation workforces."

Different Approaches

Knack, in Palo Alto, Calif., uses video games as its entry for job candidates. One game, Wasabi Waiter, takes 10 minutes to play and casts players as waiters in a sushi restaurant. They must manage customers, dole out advice and serve to the best of their ability. In every Knack game, each decision is recorded and transformed into data by special sensors that enable algorithms to process player behavior. The game sessions, Halfteck says, allow Knack to deliver accurate assessments of traits such as creativity, persistence/diligence and other characteristics that are hard to discern from a resume, college transcript or interview.

As a gauge of its effectiveness, Halfteck points to results of pilot projects testing Knack's technology, primarily a trial Knack ran with a unit of oil giant Shell that exclusively focused on technological innovation. Shell wanted to find more efficient criteria in choosing new employees for this division and asked Knack to put about 100 potential job candidates to the test with Wasabi Waiter and Balloon Brigade. Knack used its games to generate a list of candidates with the greatest potential from a pool Shell provided. As it turned out, Halfteck says, Shell reports that the 10 percent chosen actually did deliver the most innovative ideas, according to Shell.

Nanette McWhertor, vice president of operations and people development at Stacked, a Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based restaurant group with just over 400 employees, used Knack games in a pilot program. McWhertor says Stacked was looking for a new approach to testing for both managers and hourly team members.

"In both cases, we were looking more for specific behaviors and personalities," she says. "Those are hard to draw out in an interview and that's exactly what this 10-minute Knack experience does."

McWhertor had Stacked's most experienced, successful people take the Knack tests as part of the pilot. The results were about 95 percent accurate, she says. Stacked has committed to using Knack in its recruiting/hiring process for one year.

"It's very innovative, though I am not sure it's going to revolutionize the hiring industry," she says. "It does give hiring managers more insight into the person ahead of time, rather than waiting for those traits to blossom on the job."

At two-year-old ConnectCubed, based in New York, CEO Michael Tanenbaum says his company uses big data to tailor its online games to evaluate candidates for any position. Using personality surveys along with simple spatial-reasoning, trivia or memory games, ConnectCubed tests a company's longtime stars to develop ideal behavioral profiles for each job that needs filling.

Tanenbaum says CHROs and other decision makers who have seen ConnectCubed's potential have been impressed, but for the trend to go mainstream, employers need to be more "data trusting," which he admits is a challenge.

"Many are scared of data," he says. "People used to succeed as HR leaders because they were 'people people.' But now HR leaders need an expanded skill set that embraces big data and metrics."

Another competitor in the space, Evolv, uses surveys — not games — to drive its metrics approach to recruiting and hiring. Evolv has collected more than 500 million data points since 2007, tracking real-world employee outcomes such as tenure, performance, attendance and customer satisfaction.

At Xerox, attrition was reduced by 20 percent during a pilot program using Evolv. At Harte-Hanks, Evolv-selected hires missed 29 percent fewer hours and handled calls 15 percent faster.

Despite the promise, skeptics remain. Experts caution that predictive tools must demonstrate clear cause-and-effect relationships and avoid introducing new biases.

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