“What is your biggest weakness?” The first time I encountered this classic interview question I was about 20 and I had no idea how to handle it. “I’m really bad at turning up on time for things,” I replied, which had the virtue of being true. The interviewer, frowning, drew a careful X on his clipboard.

The lesson I learnt is that persuading someone to hire you is like playing a game: there are rules and you need to find out what they are.

Some employers are now taking this idea to extremes by designing games for job candidates to play.

L’Oréal, Ernst & Young, Microsoft and Deutsche Bank have signed up to a smartphone app called Debut that promises to let young people “fast-track the recruitment process and land roles in blue-chip companies simply by playing mobile games”.

At first glance, it is hard to see why these employers thought this was a good idea. L’Oréal’s game involves running around a maze, jumping over walls and collecting things. Deutsche Bank’s requires you to roll a ball around the corporate logo without letting it fall off the edge. Do bankers need good balance? Do product designers need good reflexes?

Even if these games were testing for the right attributes, the obvious problem is that they can be gamed. It does not take a genius to set up several user accounts with different email addresses, practise the games endlessly, then log on with their real name once they have perfected them.

It would be like having the chance to answer that “biggest weakness” question over and over again until you found a response that did not elicit a frown.

Thankfully, these companies are not foolish enough to have overlooked this. Notwithstanding the app’s hype, these mobile games are really a marketing tool rather than an alternative selection process. They are a way for employers to engage with potential job applicants who they might not otherwise reach.

“It’s not as if we’re struggling for applications, but it’s about getting the right applicants,” says Dan Richards, EY’s head of UK recruitment. He does not want to keep fishing for recruits in the small and homogenous pool of university students who go along to recruitment fairs.

In that sense, these mobile games are indicative of an important shift taking place in recruitment.

Big employers are beginning to realise they have to change the way they do things if they want more diverse workforces.

Deloitte, for example, has changed its application process so recruiters do not know where the candidates went to school or university. It is running a video game trial of its own.

Many of the biggest law firms, meanwhile, have signed up to use a “contextual recruitment product” that identifies people who might not meet standard academic requirements but have outperformed relative to their backgrounds.

For its part, EY has scrapped all academic qualifications from its entry criteria and replaced them with a set of standardised online tests. Its research shows that a good score on these tests is a better predictor of professional success than academic performance. In the first few months of the new system, one in 10 applicants who made it to the interview stage would have been ineligible to apply previously.

“Name-blind” recruitment is also gaining ground to try to combat racial bias. Academic studies in the US and UK have shown that identical job applications make more progress when they have “white-sounding” names on them. Experiments in France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands suggest that anonymous job applications do increase the probability that applicants from ethnic minorities are invited for interview.

The evidence is too patchy to tell whether their chances of a job offer recede again at the interview stage.

Interviews, of course, are the final frontier in this battle to diversify recruitment. This is the stage where racial discrimination can creep back in. It is also where those candidates with polish and practice can still outgun the rest.

Employers will have to tackle this challenge next. “Gamification” is easy to dismiss as a passing fad involving online play. Yet in its broadest sense, it is something well worth fighting for: an attempt to make recruitment the sort of game where the playing field is level and everyone knows the rules.