Second Life Recruiting: The Future?
About two days ago, I stumbled on something that made me cringe at the thought of having missed a technological opportunity. Virtual world recruiting is something fairly new to the industry, yet many major companies such as IBM, GE, and Accenture are utilizing a new environment called Second Life for recruiting and marketing.
Second Life is a virtual world that is fully customizable and allows complete control of the environment down to creating gravity defying floating houses to weapons of mass destruction. By writing scripts or using thousands of written scripts, you can modify your character and environment in a thousand different ways. From combat to running your own advertising agencies to recruiting real world candidates, Second Life is a dreamscape with some serious potential. Second Life even has a currency which can be exchanged into real life money at a 1RLD to 278SLD ratio. In other words, everything you may need to live it up.
From the perspective of business communications, Second Life is being used as a training ground, conference room, or company propaganda platform. Cannon, Routers, L word are all advertising inside the game. The opportunity to market to over a million individuals with limited competition is nearly irresistible. I considered marketing my own blog before thinking better of it and exploring the world further.
But how viable is second life in terms of creating a viable recruiting business model? I considered leasing 100 square meter office and advertising my open real world opportunities in game. At the same time I ran across an article which clearly demonstrated that many people in SL would not take kindly to RL intrusions into their fantasy world. Would it make sense to offer recruiting services within Second Life to Second Lifers? How about advertise real life jobs to Second Lifers. It is clear that the latter is already being done and is something that I will probably engage in as well. One of the secrets within the game is that everything is based on your position in search results. If you can figure out a way come up to the top of search results in ingame searches, your traffic can potentially explode. May SL gamers will find good real life opportunities marked ingame hard to resist.
Second life is an interesting new medium that is largely underutilized by small recruiters. But as technology advances and virtual reality becomes more commonplace, have a virtual store in a virtual environment will not seem so far fetches. I’ve always wanted my own island, even if it is inside a server.
By: Gene Leshinsky, Boston Technical Recruiter
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Article courtesy of the Recruiting Blogswap, a content exchange service sponsored by CollegeRecruiter.com, a leading site for college students looking for internships and recent graduates searching entry-level jobs and other career opportunities.
