As a colleague and I were sitting down to discuss what, if anything, Aquent could do in Second Life at this late date, he glumly informed me that TMP Worldwide just opened a recruiting office in Second Life. He was kind of bummed because, well, we're kind of in the recruiting business and it sort of felt like they had beaten us to the (virtual) punch.
I dug into this a little bit and things weren't quite as bad as they seemed. TMP Worldwide is a recruitment advertising company, strictly speaking, and, if I've understood their press release correctly, they've established a service for recruiters in Second Life. Specifically, they've built "TMP Island," a place where "recruiters will be able to network with prospective candidates, host events, conduct employee presentations, and even build virtual replicas of their real-world offices for unprecedented interaction with job seekers."
As the Reuters bureau in Second Life reported, this unprecedented interaction will consist of "An avatar -- or online character -- of a real corporate recruiter [interviewing] avatars of job seekers, using instant- messaging technology."
Look, I'm in no position to second guess the business decisions of gigantic (erstwhile "Monster-ous") multinationals like TMP, especially given my own erstwhile giddy boosterism a few months back. But when I read in their press release that Second Life is "currently inhabited by roughly 3.4 million residents," it made me think that the folks at TMP either haven't looked at the Second Life homepage, which would have told them that, at least as I write this, only 23,000 "residents" "currently" "inhabit" this virtual world, (to be fair, 1.1 million have logged in over the last two months, though it's unclear exactly what that means), or aren't aware of the quite reasonable skepticism (to cite but one example) expressed about the real-world potential of this virtual one.
I know, I know. Nay-saying and cynical sniping is easy. But the fact of the matter is that Second Life, while very intriguing conceptually, can be frustrating to interact with in reality, is plagued by technical problems (just check out Second Life Insider where you could have read on Monday, "The day was plagued with the same massive problems from yesterday. That's nearly 60,000 unhappy new signups, assuming they all even got a chance to log in."), and, frankly, not anywhere near as popular as World of Warcraft.
Seriously, are recruiters and candidates really going to want to face precipitous learning curves and lurking technical uncertainties just to conduct an "unprecedented" interview with candidates via IM?
Leave a comment