With just a few months to go before she earned her masters degree in business administration, Erica Chean was ready to start looking for work.
So when she heard about a virtual business-strategy game that would give winners a shot at working for French cosmetics giant L'Oréal SA, she immediately teamed up with two other women in her class and signed up for the competition.
Once a week for about four months, Ms. Chean and her teammates logged on to the Internet and became general managers of a fictitious cosmetics company in a fictitious country. They invested in research and development, debated about how much to spend on marketing, and looked for ways to cut production costs without compromising quality -- all done virtually, of course.
And for every move they made, the game -- programmed with data that simulates real-world market conditions -- responded by showing them how their decisions affected their virtual company's share price.
"This game is a one-way ticket to enter into L'Oréal," says Ms. Chean, an Ottawa software designer who decided, after being laid off two years ago by Ottawa-based Nortel Networks Corp., to enrol in the MBA program at Queens University in Kingston, Ont.
"To get into the cosmetics industry without professional experience and contacts is very difficult, so this game represents the key to L'Oréal," she says.
Who says job hunting is all work and no play? The L'Oréal game, which was launched globally six years ago, is just one example of how companies are using computer-based simulation technology to attract and assess potential employees.
Once restricted to the military and aviation industries, job simulations are increasingly finding their way onto corporate Web sites, where they're used to pick out the top talent from those who need not apply.
In a 2005 survey by Rocket-Hire LLC, a New Orleans-based human resource consulting firm that specializes in electronic hiring tools, 18 per cent of companies said they use job simulation to recruit employees, up from 10 per cent in a 2002 survey by the firm.
"Job-simulation technology is a very powerful, effective tool for assessing job candidates, and companies are finally starting to realize that," says Rocket-Hire president Charles Handler.
"In my opinion, in two to three years from now, the number of job simulations available is going to increase even more, and awareness of the technology among employers is also going to increase."
So which employers are using job simulation today?
Igor Kotylar, president of the Canadian division of AlignMark Inc., a Florida-based company that provides employee assessment and e-learning tools, points to call centres, health-care companies, banks and real estate companies.
A large portion of these early adopters are in the United States, he says, but Canadian companies are starting to catch up.
Examples of Canadian employers using job simulations for hiring include Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and real estate companies Re/Max and Royal LePage Ltd.
Using text, audio and video, job simulations recreate scenarios that employees would typically encounter at work.
At CIBC, for instance, applicants to the customer call centre must first sit down in front of a computer screen and watch a character who explains what the job is like, explains Mr. Kotylar, whose company supplied CIBC with the simulation program.
They're then required to take a phone call from a fictitious customer. While they're on the phone, they must also navigate through a computer interface similar to what actual call centre employees use.
CIBC spokesperson Rob McLeod says it's too early to tell how simulation technology is affecting hiring decisions at the bank.
Ray Yenkana, who heads recruiting and sales training at Re/Max Little Oak Realty Ltd. in Abbottsford, B.C., says that employers can tell a lot about job applicants from how they perform on a job simulation.
Re/Max uses a simulation from AlignMark that shows videos of actors posing as home buyers. The actors "talk" to the aspiring realtors, who must then choose from a given list what they consider to be the best response to the situation.
"The simulation not only tests sales ability, it also reveals a lot of personality traits," Mr. Yenkana says.
