Recruitment/Talent Hunt in Second Life – Initial Considerations for Organizations

Author: David D’Angelo

 

About Author:

David has worked in Human Resources for seven years primarily as an analyst.  He is a member of the International Association for Human Resources Information Management.  David’s Blog “Recruiting in Second Life” can be read on the ere.net blog network and was referenced by Governing online in their September 2008, article “The Reality of Virtual Reality” which appeared in “The Managing Technology Letter”.  His article “Try Second Life Beyond the IT Department” appeared in September 19, 2008, online issue of ere.net.

The technology has very much arrived for virtual worlds to impact real world business and they will only improve in time.  Many of the early adopters have reaped the benefits of these technologies and improved their brand globally. 

Many organizations are now recruiting in Second Life.  Universities recruit students, police departments recruit cyber savvy officers, IT organizations look for talent and evidence of it in Second Life, and the list goes on.  You may also have an interest in doing the same.  Where would you start?  This post will discuss some of the discussions and due diligence you will want to perform as you frame your case for recruiting in Second Life.

 

The first step to take to recruit in Second Life is to assess if you have the talent in house or would need to outsource the work.  One caveat to consider even if you have talent in your organization that could conceivably perform the work is that it may be well worth the additional cost to have a professional design firm set up your first virtual presence.  You want to be on a competitive level and project a professional image to recruit professional talent. There are many design firms with competitive prices that will tailor a package for your needs.  Interview several before making a decision. Once you have an established presence in Second Life, your onsite technical staff may be more than adequate for modifications and maintenance.  You may even want to have them shadow the design firm when your site is created so they can perform the routine maintenance. 

 

Your next step should be to define how your goal to recruit in Second Life would benefit your business both directly and indirectly.  You will need a project plan of what you would want to achieve in Second Life along with costs and benefits.  Also, note other stakeholders in your organization who could benefit from your presence.  The obvious benefactor is your marketing and branding team.  They can assist in announcing your presence in Second Life along with leveraging their branding focus.  It is also important to discuss your recruiting strategy with marketing.  They may be able to provide some demographics of your customer base that will give you some indication of how many people you may potentially have an opportunity to recruit. 

 

Be sure to reach out to other areas in your organization that engage in training or travel frequently.  There may be an opportunity to develop virtual training in Second Life and virtual meetings for those that travel or video conference often.

 

It is a good idea to have a discussion with your legal department on your specific plans for recruiting in Second Life.  They will be reassured if you stick to initial recruiting and keep the paperwork, secondary screening, and paperwork outside of Second Life.  You may even be surprised and find an interest in recruiting an intellectual property attorney in Second Life.  There is probably no other target so rich with intellectual property use and abuse as Second Life is.

 

The last step in your consideration is your budget.  In consideration of the difficult economic environment we are in this could be a deal breaker for some.  List the costs of development and having an island in SL along with anticipated benefits.  Some of these such as branding will be intangible.  I would suggest one of the best cases you can make for recruiting in Second Life is to participate in a job fair for minimal costs with avatars that display your logo. There are organizations that might do very well with representation at job fairs periodically.  Those committed to recruiting in Second Life will want to move forward with developing an Island to build on your success in the job fairs.

 

I am certain there are other considerations but I am hoping this will provide you with a starting point on how to frame your analysis if you plan to recruit in Second Life.  One final suggestion is to make your presentation to management in Second Life to give them an ideal how virtual business can work for your organization.

Driving Business – Interpersonal Team Dynamics

Author: Business Beyond Reality

“No matter how good your project or the technology you have to work with, if your team doesn’t mesh – your project’s in trouble” , Says Stephen Howard-Sarin, Vice President, CNET’s business sites.

Team Dynamics are the unseen forces that operate in a team between different people or groups. Team Dynamics can strongly influence how a team reacts, behaves or performs, and the effects of team dynamics are often very complex.

Team Dynamics

A lot of issues personal and professional come up, when a Team is asked to collaborate between itself. They are:

1. Picking a Leader: Until and unless there is a Leader defined by the heirarchy of the organization, the team generally suffers the issue of lack of directionality. Once the leader is chosen by the team members, directionality is observed.
2. Unclear Team Objectives: Due to conflicting personal objectives, team goals are often randomly chosen and rarely tied up with overall objectives of the team. It is imperative for the leader to step in and define the team objectives clearly and objectively to avoid ambiguity.
3. Inadequate Communication: It is important for every teammate to be updated on whatever happens and to have a transparent reporting system to ensure that all misunderstandings are ironed out. It is also important to deal with contentious issues without delay.
4. Ironing Out Differences: Every inter-personal and intra-personal issue has to be addressed instantaneously for the team to function smoothly.

How Can Team Dynamics Be Managed Constructively?

1. One has to look for the team dynamics – the ‘natural forces’ at play.
2. One has to determine whether the natural forces are acting for good or bad.
3. One has to make interventions to make the effect of those dynamics more positive.

To access the level of team playership among people, LinkedIn is conducting a survey sponsored by Nokia. I had an opportunity of participating in the survey and the consolidated results as on November 20, 2008 are as follows:

 

Statistics - Level of Team Spirit

As the above graph shows, 97% people believe that working as a Team is a good way to work.

 

Responses By Seniority

The above graph indicates that senior associates believe more in team work than the others.

 

By Company Size

The above graph points out that more or less, all companies believe in the power of team work and collaboration.

 

Responses By Job Function

As expected, the product team works best as a team.

 

Responses By Gender

Women, known as having better inter-personal skills then men, are more in favour of working as a team.

 

Responses By Age

Older people, being more matured, realized the benefits of team work and are found to be in favour of team work more than their young counterparts.

 

It is rightly said…”The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” 

A Simple Business Meeting Room For A Second Life Newbie – Second Life (Post on Request)

Author: Business Beyond Reality

I’m writing this post on a special request from one of my acquaintances who wanted to know about the best meeting practices in Second Life and basic raw materials required to build an efficient meeting room in this graphic world.

The two images below show examples of simple yet effective meeting spaces in Second Life.

Simple Meeting Room

Simple Meeting Room: The above sample image consists of a centre table (Made from a single prim) and a couple of chairs (Seemingly 4-5 prims each). It also consists of a presentation board which again is made up of a single prim. The walls are of smoked glass and there’s a stoned floor with a grayish look. We’ll see ahead what it takes to build such a simple meeting room.

Enhanced Meeting Room

Enhanced Meeting Room: The above sample image consists of a slightly complicated centre table with designer chairs and a more sophisticated finish.

Some basic terms to be aware of:

1. Prim: These are Primitives which are simple shapes like cuboid, cylinder, pyramid etc, available in Second Life to construct a complicated object. The size, shape and rotation of these prims can be altered through a Graphical User Interface.

Prim Example

2. Texture: It is an image which can be pasted on the face of a prim. For example: The brown table that  is there in the Simple Meeting Room image has a brown texture on it.

Basic Facilities Needed for a Meeting:

1. Text Chat: Supported by Second Life.
2. Voice Chat: Supported by Second Life through VoIP.
3. Meeting Room: Can be easily built with the help of Prims.
4. Presentation: We’ll cover this in detail below.
5. White Board: We’ll cover this in detail below.
6. Video Streaming: Video is played on your land in SL using a URL (web address) which you set up in your About Land options. You can hook up to an existing stream on the web, or create your own if you have the resources.It’s very simple. A texture can be defined and a media file can be attached to it. Whichever object loads that texture can play the media.
   

   Adding Media

    

7. Audio Streaming: The same steps as in Video Streaming are to be followed to sream an audio.
8. Web Streaming: The same steps as in Video Streaming are to be followed to sream an audio. It is important to point out that the web page is loaded as a texture on the prim and can’t be clicked to navigate ahead.

Presentation: Second Life doesn’t support uploading office documents like doc,ppt,xls,txt etc. Any document that has to be presented to the audience is to be converted into images and uploaded into Second Life. This can be easily done in PowerPoint by doing SaveAs in JPG format. These images can be added to the texture list of the prim (A cuboid to look like a presentation board. Can be made from a cuboid prim by keeping the height and width high and the depth as less.) and a simple LSL Scripting can be done to change the image (Which actually is a texture) on clicking the object with the mouse. A lot of such scripts are available on the net for free which can be downloaded and used in the meeting room.

White Board/Message Board: An interesting technique to build a White Board/Message Board is to make a prim look like a presentation board and attach a listener to it. The user enters text on a prescribed channel which is shown on the White Board.

The conclusion is that creating real life scenario is pretty simple. It just needs some effort, a bit of creativity and a little bit of exploration !

 

 

Weblogs Stats in Indian Context – I munch the findings!

Author: Business Beyond Reality

In a recent survey to determine blogging trends in India, MSN polled 1000 visitors on its portal and came up with some statistics. Here I am, munching, biting, swallowing some and vomiting the other findings!

 

• In India, the most popular blogs are authored by Business Leaders. A good news for marketing divisions of organizations! Social Media is going to go places!

• Blogging in India continues to be dominated by men. Men constitute 75% of the blogosphere. A possible reason for fewer female bloggers is that in India, a majority of females still avoid expressing themselves through public channels. Features like password protection of the post may motivate females to beat their counterparts. Long way to go girls!

• Blogs are as much a source of reliable information as Media Outlets and TV Channels are. I agree completely. While buying anything expensive, I trust the reviews on blogs.

• 14% of internet users actively blog. That’s still a small share.

• 39% are aware of weblogs. The awareness amongst people is quite low. The companies offering blogging accounts should market it better. Long way to go!

• 85% of the bloggers are less than 35 years of age. Well that’s a little wierd. As the first point mentions that the majority prefers the blogs authored by business leaders, are most of the business leaders below 35 years of age??? Strange isn’t it???

• 49% read blogs for the reason that they find them interesting. I don’t have much to comment on this point.

• 58% blog to express themselves while 40% blog to entertain others. Okay… Interesting…

• 50% blogs recieve around 40 visitors a month. Well… That’s not too high a number. If 58% of the bloggers blog to express themselves, don’t they have a social circle who’ll be interested to know what’s happening in their friend’s life??? I mean much more people would read the status updates on facebook profile. Probably there’s some flaw in the model of blogs which people use to share their expressions. I still need to figure out what!!!

• 90% of all bloggers spend up to 5 hours a week on blogosphere. I think that’s a decent figure!

The conclusion is that Social Media has a long way to go in India…

Driving Businesses – Recruitment through Virtual Worlds

Author: Business Beyond Reality

 

Vikram Bhardwaj, CEO of Redileon, a Mumbai based HR Firm, gets a hiring contract from a global BPO which wanted to hire a general manager to run its private hotel in Hyderabad. His agency puts a recruitment hoarding on top of a hotel for less than $1. The neon sign ad flashed: “Want to earn $125,000 per annum. We are hiring a GM to run a hotel in Hyderabad.” Within 24 hours, four candidates from Ireland, Philippines, Czech Republic and Dubai are shortlisted and the applicant from Dubai joins next month.

Does it sounds like any other recruitment process and doesn’t get your attention? Well not exactly! The hotel and the neon sign ad existed not in the real world, but in Second Life, a Virtual Environment. The job however was real.

Rahul Dutta, a Virtual Property Dealer, and the CEO of VR1World has tied up with DepoConsulting to hire people across worlds through the Virtual Environment.

Wipro Technologies is bringing new capabilities to corporate recruitment via its Innovation Isle Island in Second Life. To begin with, the prospective candidates will be able to submit their resume at Wipro’s virtual campus and the initiative will be later become an integral part of Wipro’s recruitment drive.

The IBM Recruitment Center offers diverse topics. Such as: career opportunities both in the development, as well as in areas such as consulting and sales, internship offers, Dual studies at the Vocational Academy, advancement opportunities and much more. This makes it an ideal platform for students, graduates and professionals who are interested in career and development opportunities at IBM.

In Indian Scenario, a lot of MNCs are already using Web 2.0 for Talent Hunt. Jayantika Dave, Director (HR) Agilent Technologies, recently sought out a professional networking site in her never-ending search for knowledge workers. LinkedIn, a professional networking site, allows us to commercially utilise the services,” says theVice President (Strategic Resourcing) at Wipro Technologies. “The traditional channels need to be augmented with some innovation. Social networking sites provide access to profiles that often consultants fail to get hold of.” says Tanuj Kapilashrami, the India head of HR at HSBC. 

A Virtual Environment such as Second Life is a fairly newly discovered jungle to do a talent hunt. Since 2003 the online system has more than six million registered users, of whom around the clock an average of 15,000 to 38,000 actively uses the system (Source: Wikipedia). 

I had an opportunity to talk to Ashima Misri, Ops & Business Development, Indusgeeks Solutions Pvt. Ltd. She mentioned that there are approximately 2500 active Second Life Users in India. When compared to more than 30 million active internet users in India (Source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/indias-internet-users-reach-30-million-637/), the number of active users of Second Life is insignificant.

The possible causes are:

1. The concept of 3D Internet and Virtual Worlds still hasn’t become popular among the common people. Because not many people are regular on Second Life for Social Networking, people resort to build social network on Facebook etc.

2. Mediocre Graphics Card PCs/Laptops. For a lot of people, such a Virtual Environment won’t even be supported on their machine!

3. For Personal Use, people generally take Dial up Internet or up to 256 Kbps   Broadband. It doesn’t give the performance required to immerse people in Second Life. 

During my meeting with David D’Angelo (HR Analyst at Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland) who has expertise in Talent Acquisition Systems and Recruiting in Second Life & Virtual Worlds, I was told that in US, there will be large number of retirements and the competition for talent is leading to recruitment in social networks and Second Life. He mentioned that for organizations, Second Life is a great place for screening of Applicants especially over a large geographic area. This is followed by a real world interview on the phone or in person. There are confidentiality issues and legal issues about doing all the work in SL right now. 

There are primarily two models in Second Life for the talent hunt - Islands and Job Fairs which give candidates a few choices. Companies like IBM have their own islands in Second Life where candidates can pass on their resume. Example of a job fair in Second Life includes the food service firm, Sodexho, which was covered by MSNBC in the September 10, 2007, article, “How your fantasy life can get you a real job”. The article details how a job candidate rather new to SL prepared to participate in a Sodexho job fair at the suggestion of a Sodexho recruiter he sent his resume to. His efforts at learning the nuances of SL paid off and led to a job as a chef in the senior services division of Sodexho.

During an interview, what the interviewee says is not the only important thing but how he handles the situation is equally important. Many interviewers want to see how the interviewee acts under stress. If the candidate looks confused like a fish out of water then the chances of his getting the job reduce. This measure is not possible in Virtual Environments like Second Life, which fail to observe the non-verbal communication/facial expressions of the candidate being interviewed.

A Live video streaming of the face and capturing gestures through sensors/vision could compensate for non verbal communication to some extent. The technology is still evolving!