Game-thinking within social media to recruit and select job candidates

Social media and game-thinking are increasingly popular in society and in organizations. Together, they can become a powerful tool for recruitment and selection. Recruiting is about branding and communicating information, social media facilitate rapid dissemination of information, and game-thinking can encourage individuals to spend more time interacting with that information or to understand it more completely. As a result, more candidates can be reached and provided with better quality information about job vacancies in organizations, thus improving the applicant pool in two ways. Personnel selection depends on the ability to assess traits and behaviors that predict job performance and compare assessment results between candidates. Social media are replete with games, quizzes, surveys, and other tests that individuals take and share their results online, including skill endorsements, qualifications, and recommendations. Utilizing big-data techniques, organizations can tap into these habits to harvest data for assessing and comparing applicants. Several third-party companies are already connecting organizations to job seekers and vice versa by analyzing performance on social media games. We evaluate relevant theory related to game-thinking in social media (GSM) in recruitment and selection through the lens of applied and theoretical examples.