There’s only so much you can tell about a candidate’s credentials. To be able to understand a person, you need to understand how the human brain works. And of course, a better understanding of the human brain will mean you’ll be better equipped to optimize your hiring process.

But now a question arises, how do you do that? How do you hunt down the best of the best candidates that will help take your business to the next level and refine your company culture? Too bad, most hiring professionals utilize pre-employment tests that offer little to no value. Topping it off, interviews are rife with bias and mostly too focused on qualifications and previous experience.

Here’s a good news: neuroscience can significantly help you in this regard. Gaining an understanding of neuroscience can help you raise your hiring game.

But how exactly can you use neuroscience in hiring?

In most cases, every candidate who reaches the interviewing or final stage will be having nearly the same qualification as others. But isn’t this why we interview candidates? The main purpose of interviews is to get to know the candidate and see if they can be a good fit for the organization.

According to Harvard Business Review, however, “unstructured interviews consistently receive the highest ratings for perceived effectiveness from hiring managers, dozens of studies have found them to be among the worst predictors of actual on-the-job performance — far less reliable than general mental ability tests, aptitude tests, or personality tests.”

Neuroscience gives us a substitute. Talent acquisition expert and neuroscience specialist Jan Hills believes that by closely watching how a candidate interacts with other employees can help you give insight into a candidate.

So instead of directly jumping into interviews, you can use AI-powered gamified assessments that are backed by neuroscience to put candidates into work-related situations to see how they would react in real-life setting. Gamified assessments provide candidates a fully interactive, game-like experience, so employers can see how the potential hires would perform in certain situations.

Once you have separated the wheat from the chaff, you can procced to interviews.

The human brain is hardwired to want things – now. Putting the alarm on snooze. Getting immediate feedback. Succumbing to the desire of eating chocolate. Enjoying quick wins. Our brain gives us a pat on the back with dopamine rush.

But in a time where everything is just a click away, application processes are often the opposite. Candidates have to go through an exhausting process to submit their job application.

By creating a user-friendly application using gamification, talent acquisition managers can better ensure that applicants make it to the submission checkpoint, keeping applicants engaged and your hiring on track. Moreover, since gamified assessments gather data points, they offer instant and objective feedback to the candidates by providing scores.