Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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Gamification Where You Least Expect It with David Dand | Episode 430

 

If you’re considering gamification for engagement, retention, or loyalty, I’m happy to compare options with you: professorgame.com/chat

The biggest impact of gamification often happens in the least obvious places. In this episode, Rob Alvarez talks with David Dand about using game-inspired strategies in recruitment, leadership, and employee experience to attract better-fit talent, reduce churn, and build stronger, more human organizations, even in highly traditional sectors.

David is the Founder and Managing Director of Coreus, a boutique hiring services provider based in Brighton. Coreus specialises in helping professional SMEs tackle critical talent challenges and is experienced in the complexities of recruiting in skilled, competitive, and often highly regulated markets. David is a CIPD-qualified HR and recruitment expert with a career spanning global firms such as EY, AXA, and Roche, with a focus on cultural fit, leadership assessment, and career coaching. He lives in the South Downs near Brighton, UK, with his wife and their three mischievous children. His interests include music, travel, and sport.

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

David Dand (00:00)
isn’t that exciting, but the spaces that you would least expect to engage in this subject are the ones where you can make the biggest splash and the biggest waves.

Rob (00:08)
Yes, we will be diving into the splash and the waves very, very soon with David. As you know, this is Professor Game. It’s a show where we discuss how games, gamification, game-based strategies help us boost retention, maximize loyalty, engagement, and build strong communities. And I’m Rob. I’m the founder of Professor Game. I’m also a coach and I’m the head of engagement strategy in Europe for the Octalysis group, the prime leading gamification consultancy.

And also a professor of gamification and game-based solutions at IE Business School, EFMD, EBS University, and many other places around the world. And before we dive into today’s conversation with David, I just wanted to know if you are in any way struggling with engagement, attention, loyalty, churn in your business or your product, and you want to turn that around. Let’s have a quick chat. All you have to do is click on the link in the description. Engagers, welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game.

podcast and today we have David with us, but David, first need to know, are you prepared to engage?

David Dand (01:10)
Absolutely. Yes.

Rob (01:11)
You have David Dand. Dand is the right way to say it. So we have David Dand.

David Dand (01:18)
The

series says darned, but that’s not right.

Rob (01:21)
Okay,

dand. Dand. That sounds a lot more British, right?

David Dand (01:25)
There

you go. you, sir. ⁓

Rob (01:27)
So he is an HR professional with over 15 years of experience in people focused roles in professional services, education, charity, and he’s certified licensed career coach, PTTLS certified teacher and post at 16 education and director of an HR consultancy in the talent acquisition consultancy. Chorus, talent acquisition, is that still accurate?

David Dand (01:50)
Yeah, that’s bang on. Yeah. It’s where you could say call us. But the point is, that human people, quality people practices should sit at the core of the business and quality recruitment. The idea that you want the best people around you should be at the core of the business. And the second part is music. No, that ideally what does great recruitment give you is, is that starting murmuration where, but it’s, it’s the fly.

you know, that you’re working with people, it’s joyous, there’s loads of movement, you know, the communication is almost hidden, you just get it, you work well with people. And that’s what that point is about chorus being in harmony with each other.

Rob (02:31)
And Chorus has a gamification specialism providing personalized recruitment services for senior and C level gamification positions. They’re a guide in using gamification to optimize a talent acquisition journey from talent attraction to streamlining, selection, and ensuring seamless onboarding. And they provide career coaching and career counseling support to gamification professionals in transition. So David, are we missing anything in that intro that you want to make sure we highlight?

David Dand (02:59)
no, I think that’s, that’s great.

Rob (03:03)
Amazing, amazing. So David, if we were to sort of shadow you or follow you around for a day or a week, whatever you want to go for, what would that look like? What would that feel like to be in your shoes for some time?

David Dand (03:14)
Uh, so I think it’d be fun. think if there was something missing from that, would be the strain of fun and joy. And I feel like work should be fun. Uh, so, you know, I think a lot of my focus around gamification has been less, it’s all, know, about the customer experience as it is the employee experience. And I feel like there’s a slight void there with gamification with a focus. If you go to a big conference.

There’s lights and bells and noises attracting customers to their stand. That kind of lights and bells and whistles stops for a lot of employees when they come into a business. And where is that concept? The point of fun and games and engagement with staff as a way to motivate and retain, you know, and refine where we’re all going. So I think that’s that’s a real shame. And I think you would find that.

if you followed me around for a week, is a lot of the concept of how can we make this an effective project using fun, ⁓ games.

Rob (04:27)
So David, talking about using fun and games, what would you say is a time where actually this failed or you had a first attempt in learning as we like to call them, ⁓ where, you know, you were trying something, it just didn’t work. How did you react to that? What happened? We want to be there and live that experience with you to see especially what we can take away from it and learn for the future.

David Dand (04:47)
So obviously I have a business that’s in the hiring space. We work with companies that are struggling with hiring. And ⁓ an example is we worked with a smaller sized accountancy firm who were hiring two senior managers who were going to go on to become partners. to be a partner in an accountancy firm like a senior leadership position, you’re setting a tone.

for how people should work, their behaviors, the culture. And so there’s some sensitivity around that hire, rightfully so. And we built a game with a Hungarian group that we could use to go to market that had two sides to it. One, which was this kind of technical element of, what do you know about the latest?

government’s rules complied within the accountancy and specifically within the audit space. And then the second part was this game element where applicants would move a cursor around and together they would give the leadership team, the hiring team, a picture of one person’s technical competence, but also their character. Benchmarks against core competency useful within the accountancy sphere. So things like dealing with monotony, things like

accuracy. And I think this was highly successful. But what we learned, what maybe on reflection could have been better was the level of subjectivity with some of the questions, which were open to interpretation. And so like anyone that’s done a big piece of research, the phrasing of a question has so many leading, misleading, over-hidden elements to it.

That isn’t that amazing is the concept that was there. A heart was in the right place, but the phrasing needed so much more considering consideration before, you know, creating what would be candidates going left instead of right.

Rob (06:58)
I’ve seen so much going on in this one, at least two or three projects I’ve seen from the outside or from the inside of people trying to, the recruiting space actually saying, ⁓ you know, want to beyond because technical competencies are so varied as well. It’s like, well, how would this person fit into your organization? How do they look in terms of, you know, being more individualistic person who, you know, pushes forward by himself or, you know, more of a team person.

I’m saying this one because it’s easier or clearer to see where the tension is. You’re either more on one end or more on the other. And it doesn’t mean you’re good or bad as an employee, just means whether you fit or don’t fit in your organization. Right? So it’s a complicated one. And even just determining whether you’re one or the other always depends on how you ask the question and the question being the right thing to ask. Or you don’t ask the question, you see a behavior and how people react and so on. So it’s a very interesting space to me. It’s also a very complex one, technically from.

from a technical perspective.

David Dand (07:59)
Yeah, I think there’s lots there. it there that’s super interesting? What you’ve said is, is an organization being kind of open and true about actually who they are also. So a great thing in the gamification space, and I bet your listeners will, this will resonate is an organization might say, we love and value creativity. Well, that sounds great until you hire someone who’s new neurodiverse or highly creative. And you find out that they’re an absolute, you know, very difficult to manage.

Well, they don’t ⁓ tow the line. And I think what was great is, you know, an organization saying, yeah, do you know what? We don’t really want highly innovative in the accounts that’s disposed of, example. We don’t want someone who’s doing something like crazy ways of working. What we want is someone who’s very traditional. And so I think there’s there’s a truth there. If that organization can be clear about

what their truth is and also how they want to manage. What do they really want? And that’s what that organization got by partnering with us is that kind of deeper, ⁓ more reliable way of hiring someone who’s going to stay and is going to perform and lead others that’s in harmony with that organization. I think the second part I think is really cool though, Rob, is that

They, you you wouldn’t think in accountancy, accountancy wouldn’t be one space that jumps out at you as radically welcoming to something like gamify. And because of that, it stood out in the market. Candidates loved it. Kind of connecting back to the challenge, although some of the questions turned out to be not as objective as we would have liked. Ultimately, people come away with an impression and the candidates loved it.

It stood out as a quality experience to them that was different to anyone else. So it helped with recruiting and attracting and in the selection. It wasn’t, you couldn’t put your life on it that that tool was going to be 100 % valid as an insight to whether that person is going to be a high performer or not. It was in kind of also connecting with the way, you know, their CV, their history.

⁓ the other selection tools that we used as a way to understand their fit.

Rob (10:17)
I don’t know if you saw it, there’s a game developed by McKinsey for recruiting. I don’t know if you checked it out. I’ve just seen it from the outside. I haven’t played it. ⁓

David Dand (10:29)
I

haven’t seen that. Is that new?

Rob (10:31)
It’s got a years, but they use it, they use it or used it. I’m not sure again, never worked at McKinsey. But they use it or used it for recruiting. And it was more of a global tool rather than specific technically for specific needs. It was more of, are they a fit for McKinsey? Which is very smart, if you ask me, because it’s more scalable.

David Dand (10:52)
I love that. And that’s why we have this game education because I believe in it wholeheartedly. And there’s a number of organizations that have, you know, introduced, developed really exciting game education tools for talent attraction, not just customer acquisition. So, know, large defense groups, GCHQ, put puzzles out, things like Christmas, that attracts people that’s mind think in a certain way, KPMG and the accounts of space.

Primarily at Corus, our target audience, our target customer are smaller sized professional services businesses that are struggling with recruitment and retention. And there are so many of these organizations that are highly profitable. They’re great. And for them, I feel like there’s so much opportunity to do something with game application. But like we were talking about earlier, it seems to be larger enterprises are the ones that take the extra step.

Rob (11:48)
Indeed, indeed. So David, I’m guessing we could also talk about this in the sense of how it’s been successful or another initiative in terms of gamification and fun. Would you guide us through one of your experiences in how that went well? In a case, a sort of a proud example that you guys would like to share.

David Dand (12:09)
Yeah, I mean, it would be ⁓ for, I think the same example actually would be, was an outstanding success for the reason I’m conscious of time, but just conscious that ⁓ it made a wave in the accountancy space, ⁓ which is critically short on skills, on key skills. So there’s the element of a technical skill, but also a soft skill.

And, you know, I think what was an overriding, overriding success in that particular project is it boosted brand reputation and recognition for that accountancy firm. as doing something that was exciting, different, that was human. ⁓ and you mentioned the word individualized earlier that gave something back that was highly individualized about that candidate’s potential fit.

So, ⁓ you know, for not a costly, not a huge investment, is able to do something that, you know, really hasn’t been done before in a space that is maybe seen as more traditional being accountancy. know, that’s not accountancy and advisory is not ⁓ investment banking. Some people might think it’s financial services, but it’s a completely different sort of ball game.

Rob (13:28)
It’s the boring side of business for most people. ⁓

David Dand (13:33)
Boring, is she rich? I would say completely different. would say it’s exciting. And accountancy space provides a really secure and stable career for lots of people. And the counters are kind of the end of the phone from the pandemic for lots of businesses saying, my goodness, how, where are going to go? Should we go right or should we go left there? And so the accountancy space has been, it’s got so much change at the moment. There’s even more reason to double down and think about

one of the organisation’s biggest assets which is its people as a way to reduce turnover and reduce the cost of replacements.

Rob (14:10)
No, I was saying that because I had a stint of teaching, ⁓ what used to be called statistics. Now quantitative methods sounds a little bit more exciting. At some point, somebody took a strange decision. I’m not going to judge it, ⁓ but they call it, ⁓ something like decision strategic decision-making or something like that. was like, wow, there’s no strategic decision-making and teaching, you know, decision trees and that kind of stuff.

I had, you know, as a business school professor, I knew I had one of the two subjects, nobody came to the business school looking forward to, which was ⁓ quantitative methods, statistics, or however you want to call it. And the other one was, ⁓ cost accounting, think is the one, not financial accounting, which is, you know, more financial and finance. not the exciting stuff, right? Not the sexy, ⁓ exciting stuff. I can speak to, to, that side of things and not to say.

David Dand (14:53)
sexy

Rob (15:02)
You know, you, you can’t survive without accounting. You can’t survive without statistics and most of the times as well. ⁓ but it is the kind of thing that people from the outside see is boring. People on the inside, don’t get me wrong, people who really enjoy this, see this as one of the most exciting career paths in the world. Right. But even if you’re not in marketing, you can kind of convince somebody that marketing is exciting. Right. Even if you’re not, you know,

A, you know, operations is probably on the lower end, but you can still say like, there’s all these exciting things. The most exciting accountant, the most exciting statistician can come up to you and say, this is so exciting about my job. And most people will say like, yeah, I’m not excited at all. Right. So, so it is tough in that sense for, for that. And when you were saying it’s one of the traditional industries, I related very much to that experience I had, where, it was tougher. Like students were expecting they come to a business school.

looking forward to their marketing, to their finance, to some of them even to operations. Entrepreneurship for sure, innovation, none of them came looking. In fact, I had a student, funny enough, I gave quantitative methods and statistics. There’s a student who came from legal and his only remark on that first class was my objective in this class is to stop being afraid of numbers. It was that far. Like he was afraid of numbers. He ended up working in marketing using

All the statistics and all the stuff we saw in quantitative methods, because now marketing is very quantitative oriented. So he’s now like super excited about everything we saw, but it’s more post-mortem so to speak that, that people get to see, get to see the interesting side of, of that in many ways.

David Dand (16:40)
Anyways,

isn’t that exciting, therefore, that the spaces that you would least expect to engage in this subject are the ones where you can make the biggest splash and the biggest waves. So, you know, one, to come back to my frustrations here is that often in these traditional spaces, you’ve got the leadership team who say, we don’t talk about games when in fact you can challenge them by saying, you know, what do you enjoy doing on the weekend? You know, it’s all I play golf, you know, and you’re like, okay. So.

You know, the concept of what they’re doing that really gets the best out of them, where they are at their very best. Yes, there could be walking around in nature, but it’s the idea of competition, having a goal. You know, how can you bring these concepts back into work that enables you to lead more effectively and engage staff and avoid the costs of unnecessary, unhealthy staff turnover and retention. And likewise in the recruiting space to recruit in spaces.

where they are desperately short of key skills. ⁓ Really exciting. There’s so much opportunity to make a difference.

Rob (17:46)
Absolutely, absolutely. in terms of gamification and bringing excitement even to, as we can call them now, traditional spaces, do you have any, I don’t know, any best practices? I don’t want to say silver bullets, but anything that you think would, you know, just thinking about it in those terms would bring significant benefit to almost any project.

David Dand (18:08)
I mean, I would turn that around. I’d love to know what your thoughts were.

Rob (18:10)
Best

practices, for me, main one is going to be very general and generic is if you have never approached this before, know, pick one, there’s many frameworks out there. Of course, I can recommend the one that I use, but beyond which one you choose is choose one. Try it out fully, right, to its full extent and see what worked, what didn’t work for you. So you can then adapt or say, you know what, this framework is not for me. Look for something else rather than read, you know,

a thousand papers and articles and 10 books, try to piece it together all by yourself without having any prior experience and saying, now I have come up with a better framework that I can use. Because that’s where, you know, that statistic of 80 % of gamification projects fail. It’s usually, I would say most of them are, are in that space or just piecing like, ⁓ points batches leaderboards. Let’s just put it there and throw some game elements inside. ⁓ Which, one you choose. Again, I have my preferences.

But whichever one you choose, would say dive and go all in with a framework that you can stand behind for whatever reason you have credibility on that one and choose it and use it.

David Dand (19:20)
Yeah, I like that. And I think that the kind of feeds and experience I had, which was within an insurance and financial services organization where they were wanting to embed gamification in the talent attraction and selection process. And the options were tricky. So talking when you were talking about Mackenzie earlier is what model are you going to go with that actually represents our culture effectively? So what game actually feels, uh,

but valid in terms of in the financial services space, rather than how can we create this pirate game, which kind of ends up with debts or something as an example. it’s not going to work in an investment bank or an insurance firm. That really doesn’t work. And maybe there’s an opportunity to make a difference and create something really bespoke. But the point there is really, our clients, we work in the professional space. So technology, FinTech.

Rob (20:06)
I have an example.

David Dand (20:20)
accountancy legal providers, there has to be a vibe that is at the core of what you’re looking to do here. But I think the other thing that is, I’m really mindful of is bias. And I think this comes back to this concept of subjectivity in terms of the questioning used, but bias within gangification and AI is a problem.

that’s maybe a whole nother level of subject here, but how can candidate selection, recruitment and gamification work to reduce bias rather than encourage it.

Rob (21:00)
Hmm. There has to be a lot of intentionality there as well. It’s one of the first things. It’s really hard. Bias is one of those things that we can’t run away from. Not even now with AI.

David Dand (21:13)
But

even more so. That’s one of biggest challenges with AI. It’s something really exciting and difficult.

Rob (21:21)
It’s funny with AI sometimes, you know, how the mistakes it makes and you have to point them out. But if you don’t realize and you’re not conscious that there is going to be bias, it’s even harder to spot it. And if you don’t spot it, it’s going to be there. You can say, oh, you have this bias and AI is going to agree with you most of the time. like, oh yeah, of course I didn’t realize. But you know, it’s just bringing in the bias that it finds in the internet. So when we created the bias, it’s still going to be there.

Unless we disappeared and from the internet, it’s not going to disappear. AI is probably. LLMs to be more specific are pretty much always going to rely on, on the internet. There’s always going to be bias on the internet. So that’s not going to disappear from LLMs is my overarching theory.

David Dand (22:07)
bias, ⁓ leading or misleading, know, gray.

Rob (22:11)
misleading.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. David, after hearing these questions and what we’ve been discussing, is there anybody that comes to your mind and you say, well, I would be curious to hear this person answering these questions. I’d like to know what they think or, you know, how they approach these problems ⁓ that you would like, if you’d your guest essentially.

David Dand (22:31)
Well, I think the kind of the director of talent acquisition at McKinsey, I would be really like, I’d love to know how that project rolled out. What were the successes? What was on reflection could have been done better? And what were the challenges they experienced during it? I think that would be a really exciting, fresh insight.

Rob (22:50)
Sounds like an exciting one for sure. And keeping up with inspiration, would you say that there is any book that you would recommend for the engagers? Remember this crowd of people thinking, ⁓ gamification sounds exciting. How do I do it? What do I do? Or how do I improve my practice? They’re already doing it.

David Dand (23:07)
I mean, smart recruiters, there’s a French CEO who wrote that book and I think that’s really exciting. So maybe we can put a link to that at the end of this podcast. And that looks at what smart hiring looks like. And there’ll be many opportunity to add again, locations.

Rob (23:26)
Sounds amazing. Love that. And in the space, in the space of gamification, what would you say is your superpower? That thing that you do at least better than most other people.

David Dand (23:35)
So

yeah, ours is on the lens on the people experience, which really matters to me. And I think our starting point is always this idea that you’ve got great, it’s from personal experience, working in a really high performing business, high performing team that was growing. Everyone was having fun, communicating in an amazing way. And a senior leader was hired who took down that office. Everyone started communicating different, the vibe in the office changed.

People were giving blood, sweat and tears on working on the weekends to deliver something great. were innovating with their customers, improving conversion, reducing risk, improving efficiency. And one person was able to change that. So I feel really powerfully about the risks and the opportunities to great people practices. And that’s our starting point. You know, how can you invest in your current staff?

in a more fair and exciting way. And also help attract the great people who stay and perform and the add to that business. That’s something that feels important to me.

Rob (24:47)
certainly is. David, we get to the difficult question now. What is your favorite game?

David Dand (24:53)
Chess, chess and football. isn’t that a joy? Football, brilliant. I was doing some training this week with an organization and sport comes into and it’s forgotten that concept of joy, how you can bring that into the work. The common themes between conditions where people work their very best and sport ⁓ is something there. But chess I can get lost in for hours. Football, I just love it.

Rob (25:21)
As a player, as a fan, what’s your…

David Dand (25:25)
Mainly as a player. just think, you you’ve got an individual responsibility to do Michael Jordan quote, there’s no iron team and I’m winged. So you individually are accountable for executing, but the working in a team, ⁓ fun competition, a bit of risk, a bit of aggression, speed, ⁓ brilliant clear goals.

Rob (25:48)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I use it as an example. When there’s Americans, say soccer, which I don’t, I don’t like too much. Where, or, you know, when, when explaining the, rules of, of a, of a game and how detailed it has to be, I say, imagine an alien comes, you know, lands here and you need to explain to them the game. Football.

So the objective is to pull the button, the ball on the net and they just grab the ball and put it there. So no, no, no, wait, wait, you can’t touch it. Use your hands right now. Okay. No hands. can use only your feet, your head. ⁓ fantastic. And then you put some adversaries, the other team in the middle and they pull out their laser and start shooting them. No, no, no, wait, wait, you can’t use violence either. you know, it gets into all these rules, all the nuances, and that is actually what makes the game fun. If you don’t have any rules.

There’s no fun to it. put the ball in the net. You grab it. You put it there. How many times can you do that? ⁓

David Dand (26:43)
I completely, when we were young and we would always have to take the mic out of my sister because she would start a game, a board game, whatever. And she would say, all right, okay, right. The aim of the game is, but what really is frustrating when you’re an employee is this kind of unrealistic changing of what we’re doing. You know, and, and, as a senior leader, sometimes we’re coming up and advising businesses where they’re like expecting the impossible. Oh, generally it’s true.

that most people thrive their best when there’s a clear goal. Now you can change and people need to be adaptable, know, post COVID life, everything is changing constantly. ⁓ but that’s the fairness starts with this clear, what are we doing? Where are we going? And then we’re to start to prioritize about what else is really important that fits in with that.

Rob (27:34)
And what is allowed, what isn’t allowed as well.

David Dand (27:36)
Yeah, that’s

right. As a start line point. Are we clear on this as an employee and as an employer?

Rob (27:42)
And you can be clear about it. You can have it written everywhere and still that’s not part of the culture because nobody really applies it from leadership down. what is it? What is it really? What are the unwritten rules? And that’s what makes it a lot harder than football. You know, you can have the rule book, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. sure. David, it’s been a pleasure having you on the podcast. don’t know if there’s any final piece of advice, of course, let us know where we can find out more about chorus, about you, the work you guys are doing before.

before we finish off.

David Dand (28:13)
⁓ No, I mean, what else? What final bit of advice? Go on, have fun. Yeah, know, joy, joy, happiness, fun, funny, funny, humor, isn’t, isn’t, there’s not enough of it, especially in the professional landscape, professional services, SMEs. So you can find us at ⁓ chorus.co.uk or chorus.co.uk. You can find me on LinkedIn.

We’ve got quite an amusing Wit and Wisdom campaign which we’ve been doing with famous quotes and relating that back to the kind of people experience. But yeah, really happy to hear from anyone and have a confidential chat about their career or opportunities. Yeah.

Rob (28:58)
Amazing. Thanks a lot again for your experience, your insights and everything in between.

However, David and Engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Hey Engagers and thank you for listening to the Professor Game Podcast. since you’re interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty, using game inspired solutions, how about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on school. You can find the link right below in the description.

thing is to click there, join us. It’s a platform called, called school is for free and you will find plenty of resources there will be up to date with everything that we’re doing, any opportunities that we might have for you. And of course, before you go into your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of professor game. See you there.

 

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