Second Life Recruiting

Posted on March 27, 2007
Filed Under Online Recruiting |

There has been a lot of buzz in recently about recruiting in ‘Second Life.’

What the heck is Second Life? Yeah, that was my response. Second Life is a virtual world that exists on the Internet with an average of 15,000 to 40,000 users online at any given time. Each user has a persona that they create in the form of an Avatar (character). An avatar can be whatever it’s originator wants it to be. It is assigned a fictitious name. For example, my avatar is Dougie-Fresh Boucher.

Users can buy land, rent apartments, drive cars and even fly. They communicate with other users that are online at the time. There is actually a $1.0 million dollars a day being spent each day on Second Life. (Yeah - I don’t get it either). And now, they can find jobs.

Anyway, some geniuses now think that virtual job fairs can be conducted in Second Life. Cost to participate - a mean $15-25 thousand. Yeah - thousand. So you can have an avatar come to your booth, not knowing what skills they have, where they are from, which personality of the owner it is, and talk to you about your job.

So who mans this booth? How much of their time will they spend typing responses to questions and still not know anything about the character in front of them? How do you calculate return on investment? How much will it cost you to now have to design an online career fair booth? Will that project move ahead of the other 20 projects you are waiting on IT to finish?

It’s a lot of questions for a lot of uncertainty. I think before we consider a ’second life,’ we need to succeed at our first life. And in our first life - we have a substantial war for talent on the horizon and our our recruitment budgets are being slashed each and every day. Time is our new commodity. We need to spend it wisely.

Another great post on Second Life Jojb Fairs can be found here:
TMP Selling Second Life Job Fairs now