KEY POINTS:
Spending time on social networking sites is becoming a new form of job seeking.
Recruitment firms are developing presences on sites like Second Life as a way to build up their lists of potential clients, as well as branding themselves as IT savvy.
On his Engage Blog, Wellington HR specialist Paul Jacobs identified several multinational companies with a New Zealand presence who have tested the virtual waters, including Sapphire Technologies, TMP Worldwide, Kelly Services, Semper International and Manpower.
It raises some interesting questions for firms, such as what the online brand should look like, what you offer visitors, how it should be staffed - Jacobs says while his avatar (the virtual alter ego created for Second Life) was visiting the unstaffed office of a recruitment firm, he struck up a conversation with a job seeker.
Would it be ethical to poach that person? Jacobs asked.
"It was a bit like sitting in the reception area of a recruitment agency in First Life and approaching their jobseekers as they're heading into an interview with a consultant."
While Second Life has been around for four years, it has gained momentum in the past 18 months as a means for people to communicate with each other and get the sense of being in a large global community.
It is appealing to technology-oriented firms, with companies like Microsoft and IBM having presences.
Italian IBM staff are planning virtual industrial action later this month, targeting the 50 virtual facilities in Second Life which Big Blue uses for research, training new employees and meetings.
Malcolm Dunford, Sapphire Technologies chief operating officer, says the entry to Second Life came at the suggestion of a designer refreshing the company's website.
"We were looking for ways and means to interact in more innovative ways with job seekers and customers," Dunford says.
The fact a good percentage of Second Life's eight million denizens are IT professionals made it attractive to the specialist IT recruiter.
The site means an ongoing commitment to staffing and development of virtual goodies like podcasts for visitors to download and T-shirts for their avatars to wear in Second Life.
Job seekers are able to pass their CVs over to Sapphire in the virtual world.
"We are trying to project that we are an innovative IT community," he says.
The move from face to face to web-based to a sort of 3D world is an evolution of IT that Dunford says Sapphire Technologies needs to stay on top of.
"You have control of what you look like as avatar, what you build, where you go."
Dunford often staffs the site, talking to visitors, helping them pick up the free T-shirt, maybe talking to them about their next job.
"We have applicants from around the world, so we go through those and select best people possible for positions, of there may be roles for these people in future."
Dunford says Sapphire is also looking at ways its clients can profile themselves to job seekers through Second Life.
"It's a facility which can be constantly evolving. Even on our own website we have RSS feeds, a podcast series to give job seekers more up-to-date information about the market," he says.
Dunford says even for non-geeks, the virtual environment is easy to get round and manage.
"Generation Y people will find Second Life second nature," he says.
Another person pushing the bounds of Second Life is Peter Rive, whose PhD at Victoria University's School of Design is being completely supervised through the virtual environment.
Rive says it's an attractive environment for IT recruitment.
"As opposed to a website, it's a sort of a 3D Wiki, and if you are trying to attract developers, coders, graphic designers, you are talking to them in a medium they are developing in.
Rive, or Dexter Aquitane as his avatar is known, has recently written a book chapter on working in virtual workplaces, says Second Life's sophisticated digital rights management engine, its scalability, and the ability it gives people to communicate and share knowledge and objects gives it an edge on many other competing virtual realities.
Because it uses streaming technology, users don't have to download the entire world onto their PCs.
In May, Steve Prentice from research firm Gartner predicted that by 2011 some 80 per cent of active internet users would be engaged in a virtual world.
Marcia Lyons, Rive's PhD supervisor, says Victoria University's Digital Media programme has bought an island on Second Life and is using it as a test bed for research on social networking in virtual worlds.
"It opens up a lot of doors for students. All students are in avatar form, so they can interpret their own identities - which are often very different from how they are in First Life.
"Students are able to interact in more unusual ways."
It means Rive is able to manage his teaching workload while living in Auckland, as well as bringing in people from around the world to give lectures in Second Life.
Students are also required to blog, and to make a movie financed and produced in the virtual environment.
"It's a new way of teaching," she says.
