Virtual World Staffing: Virtual Job Candy Founder Heads PIA/GATF’s 3D Web Presence in Second Life

Reprinted from Trends to Act On: Working with Avatars, Contingent Workforce Strategies, June 2008
Staffing companies offer virtual, 3-D Web
By Bridget Mintz Testa

When the World Wide Web was new, the brave and the foolish dived in, unsure of what messages and formats would work in the strange new medium. Many, perhaps most, experiments didn’t work, but eventually, we got e-commerce companies like Amazon and eBay, job boards and corporate Web sites. Today it’s hard to remember when it was all new and scary.

Now it’s time to get ready for the next phase of the online world: the 3-D Web. Here, the view on the computer screen looks almost as real as the view out of your office window, and each person on the site is represented by a figure called an avatar that can walk, talk or even fly.

This new Web is just as novel and scary as the 2-D Web was at first. A few companies in the recruiting and staffing business have entered the nascent 3-D Web, mainly through the virtual world known as Second Life (www.secondlife.com), establishing a presence for experimentation and development. A few of them, including Semper International, Randstad and TMP, are helping clients enter the milieu.

Going Virtual
When Brian Regan suggested that the 16,000-member Printing Industries of America/Graphic Arts Technical Foundation go into Second Life, it was a tough sell. Tony Vinski, PIA/GATF’s manager of Internet communications, says, “For our members, who focus on printing and the tangible world, Second Life, a virtual world, was out of the box.”

Regan, who is president of Semper International, a staffing firm that focuses on traditional printing and graphics and new, interactive media, hosted a tour for PIA/GATF’s executive management. That experience was enough to persuade them.

Once convinced, Vinski says, “We brainstormed with Brian on what was possible. We decided to tie in with our September 2007 trade show theme, ‘Team PIA/GATF.’”

PIA/GATF’s membership includes printers and industry experts who’ve been in the industry for decades. “It was important that everything in Second Life have a practical purpose in their real lives, like selling a product, linking to a Web site or sales and interview training,” Vinski says.

Semper and PIA/GATF collaborated on every step of the organization’s virtual building, which was designed and built by Semper to look just like the organization’s real Pittsburgh headquarters. To demonstrate Second Life’s practicality, the virtual building contains places where visitors can get news from PIA/GATF’s Web site and an online store where visitors could buy tee-shirts. Two other “stations” enable printer sales staff to practice their spiels and students their job interview skills.

“We relied on Semper’s expertise, regarding what would and wouldn’t work,” Vinski says. “We ran ideas past Brian, who helped us vet them for cost and feasibility.” Semper even built a rooftop football field where avatars could rack up points by kicking field goals.

PIA/GATF plans to use its Second Life headquarters for training and education. “We’re looking at what’s best for Second Life and for the real world,” Vinski says. “Some training must be done in the real world on real machines. But conceptual training, sales training, and traditional online training can all be done in Second Life.”

Experimenting in 3-D
Global giant staffing company Randstad entered Second Life in the spirit of a scientific experiment to learn all it could about the 3-D environment. In the experiment’s first phase, the company studied Second Life’s social environment and then helped a few clients launch their own “in-world” sites. “We provided some of our advisors to [telecom company] KPN and [finance company] ABN Amro and provided hostesses in Second Life for their launches,” says Marc Feitsma, manager of Randstad’s strategy and business development.

“Because we knew how to interact with avatars, we provided all of that to clients. We explained the do’s and don’ts, and we did lots of presentations,” says Feitsma. Phase 1 concluded with a successful job fair.

Phase 2 was to see if 3-D could play a serious role in the conversion of Web site visitors into Randstad associates and if employers would view it as a valuable aide to pre-selection. Randstad held two job fairs in November in its physical offices in The Netherlands, one for banking and one for IT.

Candidates who couldn’t come physically could attend via Second Life. Randstad supplied “EZ Avatars” for everyone. Job candidates’ resumes were linked to their EZ Avatar so that employers could see the avatar and the resume simultaneously.

“The financial director from the Bank of Scotland came and met a number of good candidates,” Feitsma says. The director wanted one promising candidate to move to Amsterdam for a job. “He saw Second Life as a very good pre-selection tool because she didn’t want to move to Amsterdam,” Feitsma says. He could end the interview in 15 minutes.

“At the end of those evenings, we had more than 250 relevant applications,” Feitsma says. “Thirty of them are going through the interview process, and seven people have been placed,” he says. Convinced of the value of 3-D virtual worlds, Randstad is now considering how to build its own 3-D platform to increase the conversion rate of Web site visitors to associates.

Being Cool
TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications, which specializes in recruitment ads, established its presence in Second Life early in 2007. Once there, TMP wasted no time in getting the word out to clients like EMC, a global leader in information systems, solutions, software and services.

“TMP brought the idea to us,” says Polly Pearson, vice president of employment brand and strategy engagement at EMC. “They wanted EMC to be there, because it was new and cool. They showed they could think out of the box by suggesting Second Life to us.”

EMC loved the idea and acted on it immediately. “A company that wants to have a presence must buy land and build a building,” Pearson says. “It might take a few months to a year to do it alone.” TMP provided EMC and other clients with a “start-up kit” that cut that time down to less than 30 days.

“TMP already had the land, the designers and examples of buildings, and they helped us figure out what would play well with our building and layout. They really shaved time off and made it easy,” Pearson says. EMC built on TMC’s virtual land, which it rents for real dollars.

When TMP arranged two job fairs in Second Life, EMC participated in both. “‘Cool’ is an important reason why EMC wanted to be there,” Pearson says. “We want to get the right talent, passive as well as active - good, confident, competent people that aren’t necessarily looking.”

EMC hired two candidates, one in finance and one in IT, at the first job fair. Each individual had rare and highly desirable skills. “The financial hire wasn’t so impressed with the technology,” Pearson says, “but it was really neat for her to do an interview in Second Life. It made her cool in her friend’s eyes.” As for the IT hire, EMC’s presence in Second Life was the deciding factor in that person going to work for EMC rather than Google.

Besides the actual hires, EMC’s presence in Second Life and at the job fairs also garnered continuing international attention and huge numbers of visitors to the company’s Web site. “It was a great branding event,” Pearson says.

EMC’s investment in Second Life provides significant recruiting leverage, because no geographic barriers exist there. Even though EMC only advertised the job fairs in the United States, candidates came from all over the world.

“We made one expenditure for our building, and now we can have all the international job fairs we want,” Pearson says. “It was totally cost-effective to get two hires and the rest. The return on investment was immediate, given the interest, eyeballs [on our Web site] and attention.”

EMC doesn’t have to stay in Second Life forever, but the experience has shown the company how to use virtual worlds for multiple purposes. “We’re an advocate of what’s happening in virtual worlds,” Pearson says. “We think it will evolve into the 3-D Internet. This is where the Web is going.”

Bridget Mintz Testa is a freelance writer based in Houston who writes about workforce issues and technology. She can be reached at btesta@houston.rr.com.

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