In this week’s podcast I reported on the TMP UK Virtual Careers Fair, which was held last week. This post takes our coverage a little further, including a video tour of the event’s location and a discussion on the pros and cons of virtual worlds for recruitment purposes.

The event was conducted within the Second Life virtual world, on TMP’s UK Island.  Second Life users can teleport over to the island for a look around, for everyone else, I’ve recorded the following video tour:

I’ve been critical of Second Life as a recruitment media in the past, but TMP have done a good job of maximizing the virtual world’s key benefits. The UK Island’s brand oriented design is a real bonus and provides a sense of emersion above and beyond my expectations.  Here’s a list of some key benefits of a Second Life style careers fair:

• Location independence: During my conversations with job seekers at the virtual event, it became obvious that being able to attend from any physical location in the world was important. Indeed some would not have been able to attend a real-life careers event in the UK.
• Brand building: The use of a 3D environment does provide brand enforcement. A well-designed and colour-coded building can enhance core brand values. A poor one can have a negative impact on a brand.
• Collective experience: This is a little harder to explain, but after a short time in the virtual world there is a real sense of joint participation. I spent time conversing with several people and when an event occurred (for example, a horse appeared at a one point), the feeling of experiencing the event together seemed to have a bonding effect. I expect Gen-Y will understand this, it’s one reason multi-player video games have become such a popular pastime.

Of course it’s early days, and events like TMP’s virtual fair have a long way to go before they can rival conventional careers fairs.  As I see it, the primary challenges are:

• The performance: This is a big one. While Second Life was much more stable during this event than others I’ve attended, as the number of people at a single location increases the performance drops significantly.
• The communication: Text based chat is fine, but as one of the job seeker’s I interviewed pointed out, it’s not possible to judge a person’s mood in a text conversation. Second Life is now voice enabled, which will hopefully improve this.
• The human interface: Like it or not, using a keyboard and mouse is a fairly restrictive way to interact in a virtual world. It’s just not intuitive and only regular Second Life visitors will know which key to press to provide a real-time response to an event (for example to laugh at a joke). Good progress is being made by the likes of Nintendo (the Wii) to improve human interfaces for video games, so we can only hope this filters through to virtual world developers.
• The audience: Of course it’s the audience or visitors that really make an event like a careers fair really stand out. Until people are entering virtual worlds with the same ease and regularity that they visit websites, audience size is going to remain an issue.

In summary and in contrast to my earlier impressions, Second Life may yet have a part to play in the recruitment process.  The technology definitively has potential, but the role it will play is still to be completely defined.

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