Hiring 2.0: The SecondLife way; even HR is innovating?

Hiring employees have been the most significant part of reinforcing one company's goal of handling growth. By far Google is doing interview of 14 times and Eric Schmidt said its worth it and it reflects on their shares. They cherry pick on most of the brightest and the internet pioneers in technology talents in the industry. Yahoo has a lot lesser times of doing interview and most of the companies do the same with Yahoo. But the thing is it cost dollars and time to pool talents and conduct such interviews. It's always a case to show personally on the interview but in SecondLife.com you do it virtually through avatar and you got that cost cut significantly on hiring process.

Why?

At SecondLife, which is a virtual community that attracts top geeks and those less techie ones to try comfortably, you can conduct any social gathering like that of hiring process. Companies who are willing to set that up will be paying some fees which is way smaller than conducting actual hiring process. Applicants will just sign up and create their own avatar which will be dressed up for the interview and try to study manipulating it on the virtual interview process. Communication is similar to just chatting to a friend which boosts self-confidence on part of applicants. The catch is that SecondLife is bandwidth hog and requires higher hardware specs specially on graphics but they are getting acceptance from the internet and to big companies.

Some companies has been experimenting using it. As an article on Wall Street Journal says:

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.

Here is an actual setup from SecondLife that shows interview of Microsoft to an applicant courtesy of WSJ.


Some interesting user experiences are located here which depicts online community getting acceptance and that starts something is innovating. I am thrilled on how high tech companies are experimenting on this medium and they see potentials of cutting costs in this area. The SecondLife for me may be just for a community to socialize only but knowing those big companies started the risk of doing the hiring virtually is starting a fireball to new corporate tasks be done on this community. One trivial question for me is "How can a company trust someone behind an avatar?" Well, that's up for them. Ahead of it is they are looking for the applicants avatar behavior and how it is presented. Of course interviewer can't see a real head fake or a nod and a smile but things will be clearer on the psychology side as companies formulate interview analysis.

Update: There's a CNBC video on MSN about this.