Lighter side: Video games, wasabi and HR

Gamification is taken a step further with Onetest’s Wasabi Waiter. Are your candidates up for the challenge?

Gamification has been popping up in HR circles for some time now as a tool to increase employee engagement and productivity – but few have considered the possibility of games as a screening tool.

Enter Wasabi Waiter.

A new assessment tool from Onetest, Wasabi Waiter pits players as waiters in a sushi restaurant. They must serve customers the correct dish based on their emotion, the challenge – like any good game – increasing over time.

Onetest state that injecting games into the recruitment process can help to build reliable results, generate objective results, and reflect themselves as a modern brand – all while providing fun for the candidate.

“When you play, you get absorbed in the game (and trying to win!) and therefore respond naturally. Onetest Wasabi Waiter draws on this quality to immerse test-takers in activity while subtly capturing a complex mix of data,” Onetest explains. “Understanding a person's job skills from how well they play is based on an extensive body of psychometric research about how behaviour links to actual job performance.”

“We’ve had immediate interest from a multitude of industries including contact centre, retail, and graduate employers. They want to be able to short-list a large number of candidates quickly in a fun and effective way,” Warwick Kirby, CEO of Onetest, said. “A more appealing application process also helps B2C organisations to overcome the challenge of rejecting thousands of job applicants each year, while retaining those people as customers.”