So, it’s been a few hours now, we’ve just returned from the walking dinner and we’re now in the control room. Pieter just flashed his site on the three big main screens, the greatest ego-trip a blogger can have. Live blogging on a massive public display… not bad at all.
In the course of the event, the people from Vacature showed off their SecondLife island, where they’ve built and launched Career City. They have a 1000 Linden dollar bonus for everyone who puts their CV online, and they’re about to host the first ever ‘after work’ party in the game. The Career City can easily be found through the in-game search by typing ‘Vacature References’ in the search field. It’s a huge city with at this time a low population, but it’s far from launched. It just kicked off, it still needs some tweaking and a lot of ‘word of mouth’ marketing. Besides in-game searching for jobs, they’ll also host speaker keynotes and companies can do presentations in one of the many many conference rooms.
The coolest thing I’ve seen in Career City were the interactive billboards with a dazzling response time from the server. Searching for jobs at Microsoft, it only took a few seconds to get at least seven results. Too bad I’m not looking for a job anymore ;-)
The final stage of the event… recruiters are starting to get dizzy… typical call center things. The short breaks are being used to quickly check a southern holiday destination or to make a call to the kids to check if they actually had dinner and did their homework. It’s pretty exhausting to do job interviews over Live Messenger, especially when you have about ten in a row. Overall I’d say this would more likely be the exception on the rule. Remote interviews aren’t the same as real life interviews. You can’t really look someone in the eyes, you can’t really see what they’re doing off-screen. But in some particular cases, I can imagine it could be a benefit to have a remote interview, like I’ve said in the previous post. If you’re working abroad, if it’s difficult to go on a job interview because of the current job situation you’re in… then a Messenger interview might very well be the perfect first step, but obviously it would lead to a real life, face to face meeting. People don’t hire people remotely. The entire purpose of HR is that they’ve mastered the skills of ’sensing’ and ‘feeling’ if somebody is a good worker or just a player who wants to buy new tires for his tuned car to then afterwards return to the goodlife of unemployed vacation time.
