Walmart Turns to VR to Pick Middle Managers
The country’s largest private employer is using a VR skills assessment as part of the selection process to find new middle managers, watching how workers respond in virtual reality to an angry shopper, a messy aisle or an underperforming worker.
The assessment yields a color-coded report for hiring managers that describes strengths and weaknesses—perhaps weak leadership skills, but strong knowledge of the fresh produce department—that can help determine promotion decisions or the need for additional training, said Mr. Holler.
Walmart started using virtual reality training broadly last year, adding headsets in the backrooms of all 4,600 U.S. stores to train over a million workers how to stock shelves or use new online pickup machines.
As Walmart begins to use VR to evaluate workers, it can use the data to identify how certain traits correlate with performance, said Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and co-founder of Strivr, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based company that designed Walmart’s virtual reality training. “We know how high performers act and we can match with that,” he said.
But Strivr and Walmart are moving toward integrating a worker’s body movement and attention data, collected in VR, which early research shows gives a more accurate and complete picture of future performance and a candidate’s soft skills, said Mr. Casale. That data isn’t yet used in scoring, he said.
Strivr doesn’t use VR assessment in its own hiring or promotion decisions, said Mr. Casale. “I imagine it’s something we will explore in the near future on an experimental basis.”
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