Tech-savvy job seekers send 'avatar' to interview

Anjali Athavaley, The Wall Street Journal

Published June 25, 2007 at midnight

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It's now possible to meet with recruiters without actually showing up for a job interview.

Some employers are experimenting with Second Life, the online virtual community owned by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, to screen prospective hires. The program allows job seekers to create a computer-generated image to represent themselves — known as an "avatar" — and communicate with executives of prospective employers as though they were instant-messaging.

A number of big companies put the new medium to a test last month, when recruitment-advertising firm TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications LLC hosted a virtual job fair with employers such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and Sodexho Alliance SA, a food and facilities-management services company. TMP says it will host another virtual job fair in August.

The use of Second Life for recruiting marks yet another way that employers are incorporating popular Web sites into their talent searches. Employers have already set up pages for prospective hires on Facebook, the popular social-networking site, and have posted recruitment videos on Google Inc.'s YouTube, the video-sharing site. Some companies troll for prospective job candidates on News Corp.'s My-Space social-networking site.

The phenomenon of recruitment on Second Life began with smaller, more-progressive companies that already used the site to market their products. These companies occasionally recruited Second Life users who visited their buildings. Now, other employers — even in stodgier industries — are inviting prospective hires who have never used Second Life to show up in the virtual world and meet with their avatar recruiters.

Connecting with job seekers on sites they use regularly is more effective than traditional recruitment methods, especially with younger job seekers, says Dave Lefkow, CEO of talentspark, an Issaquah, Wash., consulting firm that advises companies on the use of technology in recruitment.

Second Life, which is far less well-known than Facebook or MySpace, had 431,000 unique visitors in May, according to Web-tracking firm comScore Inc. But the employers who have used it for recruitment "have gotten significant benefit out of the buzz they've generated," Lefkow said, and were able to show job hunters they are innovative.

For some people, the process may be too innovative. To use Second Life, for example, you have to have a certain processor speed and graphics card to be able to download the software onto your computer. The software isn't compatible with satellite Internet, dial-up Internet and some wireless Internet services.

And, of course, Second Life isn't as personal as a traditional interview. "The biggest difference is in the body language," says Waqar Ali, 33, who attended the Bain event. "When talking with someone in person, you are looking at someone in the eye, looking at how someone reacts to you."

For employers, using Second Life is cheaper than holding a job fair, where companies have to pay travel costs for recruiters.

Employers say they don't view Second Life as a replacement for traditional recruitment methods but as an additional step that helps narrow the pool of candidates. "I do not envision the day that we would hire somebody virtually," said Betty Smith, manager of university recruiting for the Americas region at H-P. "This is really a supplement to our regular recruiting practices."

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