Serious games and human resources management: a mapping in the CAC 40 companies

Abstract

Since almost ten years, serious games have become more and more popular in large French companies, especially with human resource managers who use them to recruit, integrate, train, support, develop, communicate and sensitize. However, few research papers are dedicated to them in the academic literature in management science. The purpose of this paper is to build a typology of serious games based on their use in human resource management. To construct this typology, an inventory of all serious games used by CAC40 companies was made. 114 serious games have been listed for the 43 listed companies since December 2011. These games have been classified into three categories and 11 sub-categories based on their uses by destination. Each of these categories is further studied and characterized more accurately from examples. Gathering information will be done in four successive steps from four different types of sources which will link data and improve reliability. This is the first study to demonstrate that all CAC40 companies use serious games and seven of them have adopted at least five. This research is also the first to offer a detailed typology of serious games based on their use in human resource management. The discussion will show how this typology helps to operationalize the concept of serious games and better understand and choose their specific HR uses.