Marriott International has become the latest major brand to use online gaming to attract talent and showcase the career opportunities it offers.

The first roll-out of My Marriott Hotel on Facebook invites people to manage a virtual kitchen, and more modules focusing on other areas of hotel operation are expected to follow.

Sarah Lenton, head of strategic partnerships at employee engagement and brand and communications specialist Evviva Brands, which designed and developed the game, said Marriott has seen a huge increase in the number of fans on its Facebook page since the game went live. “And we’ve got some hard core guys on the top of the leader board,” she says.

Marriott has around 50,000 jobs to fill worldwide by the end of the year. David Rodriguez, the executive vice president of global human resources, said as the hotel chain sought to attract “more Millennials” it must find new ways to interest them in hospitality careers.

Evviva’s chief executive Dr David Kippen came up with the idea for the game while he was staying in a Marriott hotel in Mumbai. He noticed that lines of people would stare up at the hotel from the beach, curious about what went on inside. While there he decided to do some focus group research on current employees and found that virtually everyone had been referred by someone else, usually a relative. “No-one just walked in and said ’hi, do you have any jobs?’,” said Lenton.

Nearly everyone had come to Mumbai from small towns and once they’d arrived in the big city, they would spend the lion’s share of their time on social media [websites] building their network.”

And when they weren’t building their network they were playing games: “That struck a chord with David,” she said, “who decided to look for a way to bridge a gap from the people on the beach and in the cyber cafés to them getting work at the hotel, and he came up with the idea for the game.”

The game, which can be played in English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Mandarin, provides insight into what it is like to work at Marriott and the skills needed to run one of its kitchens. Lenton stressed though that it is neither a selection tool nor is it directly linked to specific roles. However, she said games would continue to form an important part of the mix for sophisticated organisations like Marriott which operate around the world. She said if it proved successful they would like to roll the game out to other social networking platforms, such as Renren in China.

www.evvivabrands.comwww.facebook.com/marriottjobsandcareers