Bringing new recruits on board is always a delicate exercise for any organisation. Beyond the job itself, you need to pass on the company’s codes so that new employees feel at home and thrive. Play is a powerful ally in that process. Immerse them in an immersive, interactive world created by experts like the team at Arcane Experience, and onboarding becomes easier on every level. Here’s how it works.
Onboarding new recruits through play
The arrival of new employees is a pivotal moment for any company. You need to do everything you can to make them feel welcome, help them understand how the business works and get them up to speed fast.
Play is a brilliant way to support that stage, in an engaging, enjoyable format. With a life-size treasure hunt or an unusual murder mystery, new recruits get to see their workplace in a whole new light. While solving puzzles and having fun, they’ll move through different departments, explore the offices and meet their colleagues and managers. Play smooths those first conversations and breaks the ice for conversations that feel far more natural.
What’s more, this first shared experience already builds bonds between the new joiners. Split into teams, they have to work together and pool their ideas and their freshly acquired knowledge of the company. These interactions encourage the building of internal networks that will prove invaluable later on.
Play is therefore an effective, pressure-free way to familiarise new recruits with their working environment, both physically and socially. The fun factor and the shared challenge strengthen their sense of belonging — everything they need for onboarding that works.
Building bonds with the other participants
Beyond discovering the premises and the teams, an onboarding game above all strengthens the bonds between new recruits. By bringing them together around an immersive shared experience, it encourages conversation and helps internal networks form. The interactions sparked by playful activities are a brilliant way to speed up connections between people. By putting varied profiles from different departments on the same team, the game mixes people up and creates chances to meet. Participants are pushed out of their comfort zone and have to communicate to move forward together. Play brings out people’s true personalities very quickly — which is exactly why we use it for onboarding games.
These one-off collaborations during the challenges can turn into genuine professional friendships. Beyond the playful challenge, the game also reveals each person’s personality. Cultural affinities, shared interests, even similar backgrounds: all discoveries that can lead to closer relationships within the organisation.
Play acts as a social catalyst, strengthening the web of relationships around new hires. It helps them settle in far more quickly by identifying potential allies and mentors among their peers, as well as among existing employees. Those connections will make it easier for them to embrace the company culture and stay engaged over the long term.
Bringing company values to life
Beyond the practical and social side of onboarding, play is also a way to pass on the company’s core values to new recruits. Ethical principles, company culture, internal codes of conduct: the game brings them to life. Through playful mechanics and game design, participants go through an experience that embeds those values in the storyline, the challenges and the characters. Immersion in the company’s world, in the shoes of fictional employees , makes those cultural markers stick.
For example, an escape room can highlight team spirit and mutual support through challenges that require collaboration and active listening. Or a quiz can use humour to illustrate the behaviours to avoid with colleagues or clients. This offbeat, play-driven approach helps new employees remember these principles. It also creates a more natural buy-in to the organisation’s codes, which come to feel like an inherent part of their new environment.
Play proves its worth in conveying the symbolic and cultural side of a company, which can feel abstract in a more conventional format. It makes them tangible for recruits who quickly become stakeholders.
How an onboarding game works with Arcane Experience
Arcane Experience is the specialist in bespoke games built around companies’ HR challenges. When it comes to onboarding new recruits, our teams put all their know-how into creating engaging playful experiences. It all starts with an in-depth conversation with the client to pin down the specific challenges: which company culture should the game convey? Which storyline? What’s the budget? Our advisers then work with them to define the format best suited to their needs and to the character of their company.
Our project managers then take over and coordinate the whole thing end to end: bespoke storytelling, custom-made props, casting of professional facilitators, site visits with the client. On the day, these game masters immerse participants in a collective adventure paced by puzzles and challenges. The most popular games in this context include:
- The large-scale murder mystery : a treasure hunt with puzzles built around a fictional storyline. Perfect for discovering the premises and the different departments.
- The escape box : a portable escape room in a box, ideal for a meeting room. Plunges players into the company’s story and world.
- The quiz : designed like a TV game show, it playfully tests what new joiners have learned about the company.
Throughout the experience, new employees see their working environment in a new light and absorb the company’s codes. Our facilitators also make sure to encourage conversation and connections between participants to strengthen cohesion. Once the game is over, a debrief revisits the key messages in more detail and answers any remaining questions. After the event, Arcane also follows up with the client to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement.
