The Hiring Game: Gaming Technology Meets H.R.

By: Natalie Graf, BGS Associate, Special Projects

Human resource departments seek constant improvement in the way they recruit and hire, so it's not surprising that technology is rapidly transforming this process each year. With so many hiring departments struggling to match the person with the job, many have begun to question the current hiring system as a whole. Is it outdated? Is it irrelevant?

Brayden Olson, CEO of Novel, Inc., thinks it is. "It's this super-fragmented market, and everybody is using technology from the 1920s," he commented. "You need a progressive solution."

Novel brings gaming technology to the recruitment and hiring processes in a way that Olson thinks could enhance, or even replace, the current pen and paper system. The Novel team is certainly breaking the status quo; it's their greatest success and most daunting challenge.

With $1 million secured in venture capital and his first enterprise product set to launch this year, Olson's idea might be worth something, indeed.

Novel's product is designed to match job candidates with organizations for which they are suited by allowing individuals to display their true colors through a series of real-life game simulations. Through the process, the hiring company gains valuable insight and possibly sidesteps some of the difficulties HR departments typically face. Hopefully, everybody finds the process a little more fun; after all, that's what games are for, right?

Yes, you read correctly: the strategic solution calls game technology into play. It's been a few decades since gaming caught on like wildfire in markets across the globe, but the market hasn't seemed to slow; today, the U.S. videogame industry earns over $25 billion a year. That's not to mention the hugely popular social games garnering more and more attention, games like Words with Friends and Tetris Battle, which are two of the top-played in Asia. Even some medical and military sectors have developed gamified apps and processes.

In fact, Gartner Research announced last year that by 2014, over 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application. Just two years ago, Scientific American called gamification one of its "world changing ideas" for 2010. Apparently, Novel is jumping on a fast-moving bandwagon and it's plain to see why Olson has a pretty, well, novel idea.

"There are more people who play games in the United States than don't," Olson said. "Those numbers are even bigger in China and in other areas of Asia. I'm going to grow up in a generation where 97 percent of people play games. The idea of that not impacting how we learn, how we do business, how we govern ourselves, and, of course, how we entertain ourselves seems really funny to me."

Olson is a gamer himself; he developed an avid interest in the 3D game Asheron's Call at just 12 years old. He always envisioned becoming a leader in the gaming industry, but didn't believe he had to 'work his way up' before making impactful changes. Olson, a BGS member inducted at Seattle University in 2008, said Novel was borne from an idea shaped while he was still an undergraduate.

"I learned in college that if you have an idea about the way things should be—that spark—you have to go take the risks yourself and prove to the world that your idea is worth something," he said.

His idea is gaining momentum, earning the support and curiosity of businesses like Nike and Starbucks. Olson is the youngest member admitted into the Seattle chapter of the Entrepreneurs Organization; this same network also elected Novel the top student-run enterprise on the West Coast. Novel is considered one of the top three emerging businesses in the Bellevue region and the Huffington Post ranked it one of the top 30 underrated innovations in 2010, calling it "the matrix for business."

Right now the Novel team is working hard to launch their product for the U.S. corporate market, set to come out next year. "It's entirely an online platform. We're always thinking about reducing barriers to entry," Olson explained. "For really significant companies we can do custom packages and integration, but we want to make it the kind of thing where a small- or mid-sized company can be using it within a couple of minutes from deciding they wanted to use it."

The company is also preparing for future joint ventures. Novel would like to launch into the global scene "literally at the first moment we can," Olson said.

"We're a business that moves photons. I don't want to underplay the challenges of culturalization, but it is an incredibly low barrier for us to serve the world. That's very much in our intent."

It's an exciting but daunting prospect for Novel. The company faces no known competitors, but is also stacked against unique odds. Hopefully, the company can get everyone to loosen up and play around a little—literally.

"Our competitor is what people do today and have done for a very long time," Olson said. "There's a lot of conservatism around that. HR organizations in all of the companies that we've talked to are frozen by a fear of how litigious the society is here. Our biggest challenge is the status quo."