JOB FAIRS IN SL - PERSPECTIVE SHIFT REQUIRED

I was speaking with a friend of mine the other day -- a very bright, technically-competent corporate attorney. He'd been reading about TMP's upcoming Job Fair (their second), and asked why corporate recruiters are interested in this kind of thing. "I read about people showing up at virtual interviews without their clothes," he laughed. "And it sounds like some of the job-related nightmares I've had. Why would a recruiter want to interview an avatar, anyway? Wouldn't a phone call work just as well and be cheaper?"

In mentally composing a reply, it occurred to me that this kind of thing -- SL quirks, the 'interview an avatar' question, the comparison of SL with conventional communications paradigms -- are what most critics and commentors fasten on in assessing TMP's and other SL business cases. Even sophisticated journalists (e.g., NPR) see these as "fundamental questions of value." And even sophisticated SL boosters tend to get drawn into this level of dialogue. Because of course, we know it _is_ different from a phone call; and that interviewing via avatar can be extremely revealing -- though it's clearly different from interviewing on the phone or face to face.

But that's not a conversation that can go anywhere (at least not anywhere fast) when you're talking to people who don't use SL. So in this situation, I decided to try a completely different tack, and look at the "why does TMP do this in SL?" question in simple, universally-accessible, 10,000-foot terms of brute technical and business advantage. Why, in other words, is doing job fairs in SL ... not a "novel way of doing business," ... not an "incremental improvement over other methods," ... not a "way of harnessing community," but just a dead-simple, you-don't-even-have-to-get-out-a-calculator-to-figure-this-out, hard-dollars no-brainer?

"Forget about the naked avatars," I said. "And let's look at the business problem. You have a large number of applicants, spread all over the country or the world. You have ten corporate clients, each fronting a three-person recruiting team. Your job is to make it possible for all these folks to engage one another over a several-hour or several-day timeframe; and do so in a uniquely-orderly and well-authenticated way -- perhaps through several rounds of interviews each. You need to manage open, group private and private one-on-one communications sensitively, to protect corporate reputations and applicant privacy, and comply with laws and regulations. You need to transport copies of documents and connect them with their owners. And you need to manage the timing of individual appointments, reminders, transportation and facilities with great finesse to make sure things proceed efficiently, your corporate clients get good value, and your applicants walk away happy."

"Of course," I continued, "you can't ask 1000 people to stand in line for seven hours while waiting their turns with a recruiter. So while all this is going on, you also need to buffer the crowd and keep people entertained -- probably by hosting lectures on better resume-writing, opportunities in various sectors, and "avatar dress for success."

It's not," I said, "a simple set of problems to solve. There isn't a unified web-plus-chat-plus-audioconference-plus-documents-plus-IM-etc. hosted-service platform in the known universe that can do this kind of thing neatly and sweetly at scale. And if there were," I went on, "it would cost whomping money to rent and configure for this particular event. Furthermore, even if you found a solution and ate that huge cost, the user interface for such a system would be both complex and unfamiliar to 99% of your users, who of course, don't attend job-fairs on this platform every day. So the user-experience would suck unless you spent more massive dollars on concierges and operators specially trained to run this infrastructure and hand-hold customers and applicants."

"Second Life," I contrasted, "does most of what you need natively, or with minimal scripting. It's globally accessible. It handles all the different flavors of voice and text communications (open, private, etc.) and item/doc-transfer you need for this kind of complex, multi-layered event. It provides a congenial, 3D environment where people can gather, network, go off to private interview rooms, attend lectures while waiting for a callback, etc. And it'll integrate with your web-based registration apparatus to provide access control, and your web-resident scheduling apps to provide appointment management, reminders, and so on."

"Because (by and large) you're dealing with applicants who are regular SL users familiar with the interface and SL's 3D UI vocabulary (i.e., they know how to sit in a chair, open a door and give a notecard from inventory), your customer-service issues are much reduced. You can hire the concierges you need from among the general population at reasonable rates, and they can be fully-functional with little additional training. So long as your scripts are well-written and your procedures well and clearly documented, the event -- in all its complexity -- should work, and should be guidable by mere mortals."

"Even if something doesn't work, it should be fixable by mere mortals. If the audio stream goes down in the middle of a lecture, everyone just starts typing, and the show goes on. Despite whining about SL stability, rich, immersive environments are much more robust than flat-web equivalents -- where the loss of one key function, like the audio stream in a web conference, tends to make the entire gathering moot."

"Taken all together," I concluded, "this spells 'no-brainer.' There's no other solution that lets mere mortals do stuff like this so easily and cheaply and improvably."

The upshot was that I won a convert. Your mileage may vary. Meanwhile, though it's certainly reductionist to present SL as "a really fluent, flexible, extensible global voice and multimedia conferencing system that's really cheap to use," it's not _wrong_. And this sort of simple benefits-talk may get us further, in the short term, than arguing why an interviewee's choice of AO can be as revealing as their MMPI scores (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory to its friends).

Posted by John Jainschigg at 09:56 AM  Permalink

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