The Future of Recruitment: Immersive Interviews in the Metaverse

Everybody is talking about the Metaverse. What was once only a dream in sci-fi movies is now a reality.

The rebranding of Facebook to Meta on 28^th October 2021 marked the beginning of an era. The Metaverse allows us to fuse digital and physical realities through the use of a variety of technologies, such as AR, VR, AI, and social media, in order to create a collective virtual reality space.

For businesses, the Metaverse is the golden key to unlocking the fullest potential of worldwide talent.

For job seekers, it is an opportunity to expand their portfolios and skillsets by collaborating with renowned global companies in a setting which is on the cutting edge of technology.

And it all starts with the hiring process.

What is the Metaverse?

The biggest advantage of the Metaverse is that it facilitates a collaborative experience that isn’t bound to geographical and physical restrictions.

Imagine it as a network of continuously available virtual environments that resembles the real world. There, you can interact with other people and with digital objects and engage in a number of activities, such as constructing virtual homes, shopping via immersive commerce, and joining virtual classrooms. All of these activities can be enabled by digital currencies and nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

In an interview with the Verge, Mark Zuckerburg explained: “But you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it.”

Automating the applicant selection process

The Metaverse is creating new opportunities for organisations to augment their digital businesses. A major part of the success of any company is in the recruitment and onboarding processes.

In the past few years, we’ve seen a move towards AI job interviews. A specifically designed program can interview and assess candidates to determine which applicants are the most suitable before a human interview panel takes over.

This process has been implemented as a response to the increased interest in job roles. According to Glassdoor, each corporate job receives an average of 250 CVs. Four to six of those candidates will be called for an interview and only one will be selected for the job.

Instead of manually reviewing all 250 applications, AI job interviews automate the process and make it more efficient until the human interview panel steps in.

During this pre-selection process, some companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to scan resumes. Such is the case with 98.8% of Fortune 500 companies, including Nike, Apple, and United Airlines.

Other companies use virtual video interviews, where a robot acting as an interviewer asks about four questions, and the applicant has a minute or two to answer them verbally and record their answer.

The Metaverse is about to streamline that recruitment stage too.

What would job interviews in the Metaverse look like?

In the Metaverse, an employer and a candidate will be able to meet without the need to travel to the head office. The interview can be conducted using 3D technology and VR goggles.

The Metaverse interview’s purpose isn’t to just save time to travel. Instead of simply providing another remote video interview platform like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, the Metaverse opens new doors to interactive communication. This way, both the employer and the candidate can examine each other to decide if they’re a good fit for each other. Moreover, they can gather in spaces that look and feel real, thus making the experience more comfortable.

In the same interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg explained: “The interactions that we have will be a lot richer, they’ll feel real. In the future, instead of just doing this over a phone call, you’ll be able to sit as a hologram on my couch, or I’ll be able to sit as a hologram on your couch, and it’ll actually feel like we’re in the same place, even if we’re in different states or hundreds of miles apart. So, I think that that is really powerful.”

Alongside behavioural and situational interview questions, a set of tasks can be implemented in the process to evaluate how candidates deal with business-as-usual tasks. As the Metaverse is designed with remote working in mind, a virtual reality interview allows the employer to test how each candidate will work in such an environment.

The applicant is also able to bring to the table a wealth of portfolio, showcasing data, video, and statistics in 3D to better illustrate their experience and skill set.

How to prepare for a job interview in the Metaverse

An interview in the Metaverse is not much different from one in real life, simply because the Metaverse mimics our physical reality. And just as you would prepare well for one in the head office, so should you for one in the virtual space with a few extra steps:

• Make sure that all your virtual reality technology is set up and working and that you have a reliable VR headset. The last thing you want is to have a technical issue that prevents you from carrying out the interview.
• Dress your avatar appropriately. In the Metaverse, you choose an avatar to represent you. While you can design your avatar however you choose, make sure you pick one that is suitable for interviews and job environments. Just like you would wear chic flared pants and a floral blouse matched with black ankle boots in real life, dress your avatar smart.
• Make sure you use security best practices when it comes to your sensitive personal data and internet connection. To avoid malware, update your anti-malware solutions and don’t download data from apps that look suspicious.
• Use traditional interview preparation steps. A metaverse interview is still an interview, so you should arrive prepared with information on your potential job role and details about your employers.

The world is changing rapidly and so is the way we interact with each other. Bridging the gap between physical and virtual reality, we’re stepping into a world of advanced, augmented communication.

Businesses are seeing the benefits of the Metaverse as a form of remote collaboration, and interviews in that space are the first step to testing not only the candidate’s abilities but also the Metaverse’s capability to act as a next-level working environment.