When Second Life and Real Life Collide II: The Hiring

Sometimes, in the name of art and upstanding journalism, we are forced to immerse ourselves in cultures we ourselves do not yet understand. It is with this in mind that, yesterday, your favorite quasi-luddite put down the NES controller and logged in to Second Life with one simple goal in mind: gettin' that dolla.

It's no big secret by now that Linden Labs' open source world has become a sort of alternate reality boomtown, right down to all the conniving and white-collar crime that comes with it. That said, careers you hear associated with it always tend to have something to do with casinos and assorted add-on genitalia, making the whole "game" sound an awful lot like a stroll through a 3-D cross-section envisioning of the internet itself. Job recruiters trolling Second Life seemed, to me, about as likely as college recruiters passing out virtual brochures on World of Warcraft. Well, perhaps my zombie mage has a shot at Phi Beta Kappa after all, because apparently job fairs have gone digital.

The basic premise is this: instead of schlepping around, braving your natural awkwardness and impossible hair to drop off applications and go on interviews in real life (stuttering at every meeting and realizing afterward that your shirt is wrinkled from your seat belt), you get all that over with online with the physical persona (or, perhaps, fursona) of your choosing. The hope is that, with the confidence of being able to select features with which one is comfortable, potential employees will be free from nerves and can let their natural personality attributes shine through, making it easier for employers to determine whether or not it's worth it to schedule an interview in real life.

It all sounds so easy -- the potential to interview in your pajamas, talking salary requirements whilst chomping Cinnamon Toast Crunch with an open mouth. Of course, this all changes once you actually log in to the program, where "impressing for success" is no longer just a haircut, a dash through the Individualist section at Nordstrom, and a few deep breaths away. A whole new skill set must be acquired, like learning how to walk again. My first experience in Second Life went approximately like this:

3:45 -- Spend ridiculous amount of time mulling over avatar handle utilizing weird list of last names; ultimately decide on a Love and Rockets character's name and log in.
4:00 -- Try desperately to create an avatar that looks somewhat like me, a seemingly uncommon endeavor.
4:30 -- Attempt mobility. Knock into many walls and fall into ocean.
4:45 -- Inquire as to the location of any job fairs in the near future. Get hit on several times. Encounter naked dude with parrot on shoulder.
5:00 -- Learn to fly; knock into higher walls.
5:15 -- Search "job fair" in the events tab, find nothing outside of "club dancer" genre.
5:30 -- Get frustrated. Resume NES Tetris.

Suffice it to say, I did not find a job and still cannot move around with any sense of purpose. For a second I feared that my initial ineptitude came from my somewhat technophobic attitude, alone in a world of people who could navigate such an environment effortlessly, but in fact I am not alone.

You know it's a whole new ballgame when it's considered impressive that you can make it up a flight of stairs. Apparently there is often a problem where the avatars being interviewed have not yet learned how to sit down or shake hands -- this is considered a faux pas, and subject to criticism.

A fair amount of futurist business consultants are lauding this breakthrough in hiring practices, speculating that over the next ten years, it will become all the more a commonplace practice. An equally fair amount, however, are calling it a passing fancy.

Upholders of this new technique -- those who have benefited from the project, starting new careers upon the wings of technology -- claim that it enabled them to approach interviews with a beaming kind of confidence they never could have mustered in real life. I suppose it's all a trade-off, after all: the confidence of anonymity and lowered formality, for the price of one less human interaction, which may be perceived as good or bad, depending on one's comfort level with the real world in general. Assuming this method does become a mainstay in the coming years, I certainly hope that the old way is still an option. Mark against my patience level though it may be, after my own brief and awkward encounter with the program, I think I'll take my chances with the wrinkled shirt.



_DictionaryGirl_ just saw King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, and misses a time when video games were simpler -- not not about hiding behind an alternate self, but being (even overly) proud of all that you can do.