A competency assessment game that shows how people decide, before the interview

Who it is for

HR directors, talent acquisition leads and L&D managers who hire or move people in volume and want something more concrete than a CV and a first-round phone screen:

• Banks hiring branch and contact-centre staff, where the job is made of customer conversations, limits and procedures.
• Retail chains filling store roles before each season, where situations with queues, returns and stock decide the day.
• Plants and FMCG sites hiring shift leads and operators, where safety, handovers and priorities collide.
• Pharmacy chains and pharma hiring counter and field staff, where what you may and may not say matters.
• Internal mobility programmes that need a common, low-pressure starting point for a development conversation before someone moves into a new role.

How it works

1. Pick a world. Each world is a themed district of one town: Branch Quarter (banking), Store Quarter (retail), Plant Floor (manufacturing and FMCG), Green Cross (pharmacy) and Signal Street (telecom), linked through a shared hub.
2. Map your framework. We map your competency model to the situations in the world and add situations written with your own practitioners, so the cases sound like your branches, stores or lines.
3. Build the bank. Before go-live, each world is built up to at least 90 situations per language. Bulgarian and English are written independently from one blueprint, and response options are written to similar length so the longest answer is not a giveaway. Practitioners from your sector set the expert key; AI tools help with drafting only.
4. Send a link. Candidates play in the browser on any device. Repeat runs serve situations the person has not seen yet, least-seen first.
5. Read the record, then interview. Recruiters see each person's ratings next to the expert key, situation by situation, and pick two or three to discuss. A person makes every decision.

What you get: pilot, full build, run

We sell one engine with content packs, not a bespoke build for every client. That keeps the price predictable and the timeline short.

• Fixed-price pilot (3 to 4 weeks). One world adapted to your framework and brand, your own situations added to the bank, one recruiting or mobility cohort, and the outcome dashboard. The pilot price is credited to the full build if you continue.
• Full build. An annual licence per world, more situations from your practitioners, both languages, your branding, and an export to your applicant tracking system or a CSV file.
• Run. Hosting, support, a seasonal content refresh so the bank keeps growing, and a quarterly review of the dashboard with your team.

The dashboard shows what you need to run the process: invitations sent, games started and completed, time per situation, where people drop off, and how responses spread across each situation. Your HR or I/O team can export the data to study it against your own hiring outcomes.

Competency assessment game vs CV screening and generic online tests

Most volume hiring today runs on CV screening, a phone screen and sometimes an off-the-shelf online test bought from a catalogue. Each has a place. What they rarely give a recruiter is a concrete view of how a person approaches the situations of this particular job, in the candidate's own language.

• CV screening tells you where someone has been. The game adds how they approach situations from the role you are filling.
• Generic online tests use the same content for every employer. The game uses your competency framework and situations your practitioners recognise.
• Assessment centres are rich but expensive per person and hard to schedule at volume. The game is a link anyone can open, and you can save the assessment-centre day for a shortlist.
• Unstructured first interviews vary by interviewer. The game gives every interviewer the same structured starting point.

It is not a replacement for any of them, and it is not a validated psychometric instrument. It is a structured, engaging step that makes the interview better.

Full comparison: competency assessment game vs a situational judgement test.

Gamified HR work we have shipped

• Postbank VR Onboarding

  Banking · 2021 · Gamified VR programme

  Interactive, gamified modules that take new hires through the bank's history, culture and values, including virtual tours of key locations and simulated customer interactions.

• Postbank Onboarding Version 2

  Banking · 2020 · VR + gamification

  The second iteration of the onboarding programme: one standardised module that every new hire goes through, built to make integration into the company culture consistent across the bank.

• Postbank Talent Attractor

  Banking · 2023 · Gamified recruitment tool

  A recruitment game in which candidates learn about the bank by hitting physical targets in VR to answer quiz questions, designed for talent attraction.

• UBB VR Tower of Success Version 2

  Banking · 2025 · VR career game

  Players climb a tower that stands for career progression at UBB. Each level presents challenges and questions about the banking industry and the bank's culture, with more complex gameplay than the first version.

• IQOS Puzzle Game 2

  FMCG · 2024 · Browser game

  A light browser-based game built for IQOS: proof that we ship games people open from a link and play on their own device, with no install.

VR Express is an XR studio in Sofia, Bulgaria, working since 2015 on onboarding, recruitment and training experiences for banks, pharma and consumer brands. For the wider picture, see VR for recruitment, our overview of candidate assessment games, and VR onboarding for what happens after the hire.