Recruitment in Second Life
Posted on February 11, 2007
Fortune is reporting that some companies are starting to use the Second Life virtual world for recruitment. Do you have an avatar ready to be interviewed?
And just as the way we surf the web changed, the way that corporate America does business has changed in this middle space. Case in point: the most radical dotcom 2.0 recruitment wave is happening in virtual reality thanks to Second Life. Instead of posting a resume on Monster.com that will hopefully net a flesh-and-blood job interview, your avatar can be interviewed and hired all within Second Life, often for jobs possible only in virtual reality.Sure they could be overselling how popular Second Life will become but the avatar concept is probably realistic. There may be other online virtual worlds that become popular too so it is too early to say Second Life's avatars will be the only important ones. Familiarity with virtual worlds like Second Life may be a plus if you are looking for a career in entertainment, media and ecommerce. However, the audience is still tiny (about 3 million registered users and many are not active) compared to the real world and very few interviews are taking place there yet."People who have been in SL since its inception might not be professional content developers, but they have become experts," says Brandon Berger, senior strategist at OgilvyInteractive's Digital Innovation unit. Hence, Ogilvy has hired a lot of people directly from Second Life to execute projects for the big name clients who have worked to be in Second Life. Cars of Second Life
The same goes for Electric Sheep Company, a 27-person operation that brought Starwood, Reuters, musician Ben Folds and Nissan Motors to SL. The core team was plucked from Second Life, not from a pool of PR applicants or professional computer programmers, says Gif Constable, head of business development. "We hired people we had never met in the real world because we'd spent a year looking at the work they produced within Second Life, and the way that they approached the community," says Constable. "To a certain extent we knew each other... We knew that in Second Life, they were the best."
"This is like the first dotcom boom, when the forward-looking companies were all building websites because they understood that people would someday shop and pay bills and interact online. Someday we'll shop in virtual bookstores...We'll all have avatars," says Berger.
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