Recruiting and hiring have become challenging during the pandemic. Social distancing, self-isolation, and home offices make recruiting as we know it impossible. We, at CODEFUSION, had to reinvent some of the processes. Let us tell you how we did it and how InGame HR came about!
We are a small software development company from Opole, Poland. Opole is a small town with a population of approximately 130,000 people. It has two Universities where you can study for a computer science degree. We are almost solely relying on the graduates of those Universities as our employees. We start the process of recruiting well before those students graduate. We are often a guest at various events organized by the Universities. That was the case with an annual job fair at the Opole University of Technology. For years we filled our Summer Apprenticeship Program recruiting list during this job fair and gathered many contacts for potential employees. Many students came with CVs, which we gladly accepted and used further in the recruitment process. Others talked, took materials or business cards, and sometimes got back to us after the fair. We had the impression that we were losing touch with some of the students. To counteract this, we came up with a simple questionnaire that students could fill in on the spot when visiting our booth.
It worked great. The questions in the questionnaire were light and entertaining, and the students had fun answering them. We were able to gather many contacts from the students. We used those contacts to help us advance in the recruitment process.
Then came the pandemic. The University canceled the 2020 spring job fair. The pandemic worsened in the fall, so the job fair was moved online. We knew we would lose some contacts once again because the students will only lurk and not engage in conversation (text or video chat). We had to do something to mitigate this problem. We invented InGame HR and decided to dogfood it (dogfooding is a term we use in software development where the entity responsible for software product development uses the created software itself) during the first online job fair we’ve attended as an employee.
The idea was to offer the students a fun and entertaining way to leave us a lead to get back to them somehow. We’ve decided to use computer games and blend them with an online questionnaire. The students register for a game by entering his or her email address. During the game, when they lose a life, a question for the questionnaire is presented. If the student’s answers correct, he retains the life; if not, they lose the life. The game continues. We ask the students more questions, and the result is a list of contact emails and preliminary screening of the candidates.
