Comments on: Outrageous Recruiting Using Avatars and YouTube

By: Karen Dempster

Karen Dempster — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 08:32:00 +0000

I agree with your opinions quite broadly. Example: Here in Australia, one furniture company needed a regular flow of part time staff (read, young, although not permitted as a tag line) for a locality near the beach. Frustrated with normal processes, they simply wrote on the wall of a local toilet so the surfers and/or others interested in part time local work could check it out… and got a good response apparently! Their culture related to the recruit style also – and this is a vital aspect for viral forums or else you do get lots of time wastage.

By: Allan Hoving

Allan Hoving — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:28:00 +0000

I saw the Wired piece that’s been cited (it was one of a rash of Second Life backlash stories last summer; it was buried and failed to mention Wired’s own deserted SL HQ, which is as much a failure of imagination as anything else). Now SL has been discovered by TV (the crime series and The Office just featured it). And today comes news that CNN is getting in.

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003664297

But have no fear, folks, it’s just another tool in the arsenal.

By: Mason Wong

Mason Wong — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 12:12:00 +0000

I’m all for innovative tactics, so long as they ultimately prove to be cost effective. I do think YouTube exposure has some merit. However, Second Life is apparently a money pit for marketers, and by extension, presumably for recruiters as well.

Wired magazine last July revealed that actual US traffic from repeat users on Second Life is extremely small, of whom most are seeking online sex and get rich quick schemes. The outdated technology limits the system to only 70 users to any virtual region at a given time. Most virtual sites for major marketing brands have nearly zero visitors. Hype is all that the millions of marketing dollars have been chasing.

Undoubtedly, there are other virtual worlds besides Second Life, and at some point within a few years, I do believe it will be cost effective for recruiters to have an online presence with avatars and such. But for now, Second Life does not seem to be worth spending a dime on.

Here’s the link to the Wired article.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-08/ff_sheep?currentPage=1

By: Sunil Brara Sbrara@hotmail.com

Sunil Brara Sbrara@hotmail.com — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 08:09:00 +0000

Dr.Sullivan,Any average person with a bit of common sense would have thought about all these tactics(sorry,I will not call these ’strategies’ let alone ‘thought leadership’points (that you claim)!!So,what’s new?

Can small or medium size recruiting outfits afford these?I am referring to media approaches.

I request that in future whenever you mention names or companies,kindly discose your relationship with the same.You have a habit of responding only to a few ‘replies’ that suit your agenda.In the past I have given facts and authenticated figures that have been ignored by you.

regards,nevertheless!!

Sunil

By: Keith Halperin

Keith Halperin — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 05:25:00 +0000

A thoughtful, well-written article.
I heartily agree with using outrageous, out-of-the box techniques and practices. Here are a few more:

1) You will have to recruit everyone you hire- they (anyone you actually hire) will not come to you.
2) Hiring should be a deliverable of the hiring managers as much as getting out a quality product on time and within budget.
3) If you can’t afford to pay the best, go after the rest.
4) If you can afford to pay an agency fee, you can afford 1/3-1/2 of that amount as an employee referral fee- make it an expectation of the employees that they will be referring their friends and colleagues, and be generously paid for it.
5) If you want to improve your hiring process, ask the people doing the hiring- the sourcers, recruiters, and coordinators.
6) Let sourcers source, recruiters recruit, and coordinators coordinate- they shouldn’t be spending more than 5% of the time documenting what they do the other 95%.
7) Keep your hiring process or ATS simple and robust- if it takes a formal half-day orientation to figure out, it’s too complicated.

There will be more about these and others shortly in my ERE blog, ?The Real World of Recruiting’.

Thank You,

By: Allan Hoving

Allan Hoving — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 03:23:00 +0000

Great article and true to my experiences in Second Life, which is just the 3D web with avatars as your user interface. Since my grad school professor got us into Second Life a year ago (to hold a class session virtually when he was attending a conference in Australia), it has grown from 500,000 to 10 million registrants. The TMP Virtual Job Fairs there have been improving over time. And since my two tween kids were using Club Penguin (the virtual world recently purchased by Disney for $350 million +) long before I ever heard of SL, I’m sure it won’t be long before the use of virtual worlds — for communication, ecommerce, recruiting, and everything else — becomes not ‘outrageous’ but ‘commonplace.’

By: Rob Levin

Rob Levin — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 03:17:00 +0000

….just like Monster and CB and all of the other Internet technology was going to revolutionize recruiting. There may be value in some of this, but at the end of the day it is still going to come down to being able to build real relationships with real people. I personally don’t see the attraction of recruiting people in a virtual world who have created personas of their ideal self because they don’t like the reality of who they are.