Your All-in-One Guide to Recruiting with Challenges

To recruit better, faster, and more effectively, recruiters need the ability to truly understand a candidate’s skills and what motivates them before they are even brought into the team.

Implementing challenges that provide candidates with real-life tasks or projects is a great way to uncover this information. Challenges offer a candidate the chance to do real work and prove their competency in their trade area. Whether it’s developing a short pitch on how to sell a piece of equipment or designing a company advertisement, challenges give candidates the chance to demonstrate skills, motivation, and even how they will fit within the company’s culture.

Whatever type of challenge you choose for your recruiting efforts, it should clearly reflect the candidate’s abilities to perform for the type of position you are recruiting. Here are some ways to recruiting better and faster using challenges:

1. Gauge candidate passion and collaboration through a real-life situation.

A close look at the work candidates submit can tell a lot about their true passion for their craft and industry. Seeing how they interact with others in the challenge can also tell you how they do in high-pressure situations and how they may interact with colleagues.

It is a great idea to encourage candidates to interact with each other. Consider a challenge that requires some collaboration. This can tell a great deal about what role each candidate naturally falls into and who would fit well within the company’s dynamic.

2. Open it up to the public.

To bring challenges to the next level, open up the work that candidates submit to the public and allow them to give feedback. You can also give candidates the option to share their work by opening it up to their social networks.

This will allow you to see how the candidate’s work resonates with the public. It will also show how the candidate can handle criticism and praise from people they don’t know well.

3. Make it fun and interactive.

Gamification has become increasingly popular over the years. Although it may have lost some of its hype in the mainstream media, the concept is still very relevant for today’s younger, incoming workforce.

To integrate this concept into your challenges, make them level-based, like a game. As candidates complete each level, the challenge gives more insight into their work habits and skills, and it allows them to work toward an in-person interview.

The great thing about this recruiting approach is that it resonates with the soon-to-be largest group in the workforce. The millennial generation has grown up with constant advances in technology and companies continually striving for more innovation and creativity. Implementing a recruiting strategy with challenges not only helps to recruit better, faster, and more effectively, but it also connects with this younger demographic on a more personal and engaging level.

Introducing challenges can make your company look more appealing to top talent and positively influences the entire recruiting process. Think outside of the box for new, innovative recruiting strategies — it’s always the best way to recruit better and faster.