Big companies thinking out of the box for recruitment

Lotte E&C’s job fair held on a metaverse platform last month. [LOTTE E&C]

Big companies are getting creative to better communicate with young talent looking for jobs.

The measures range from holding job fairs in the metaverse, the newest wrinkle on virtual reality, to dispatching younger employees to interview job applicants.

The changes were triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, which made online recruitment inevitable, and companies’ desires to better communicate with people in their 20s and 30s.

Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor and Lotte E&C recently rolled out a recruitment process on a so-called metaverse platform.

Potential job applicants for Samsung Electronics logged onto the platform, which is called Gather Town, with their own avatars and talked to other avatars that represented the company’s human resources (HR) managers and staff.

The process lasted for a week from Sept. 8 through Sept. 13.

Hyundai Motor held a job fair on the same platform on Sept. 9 and 10, and and Lotte E&C did the same last month.

In a metaverse job fair, applicant can be more free in the questions they ask HR managers.

CJ OnStyle, an online shopping site, is holding a job fair in a "live commerce" format on Thursday.

Live commerce is similar to home shopping, but streamed on the internet.

As hosts sell products in live commerce, managers and staff from each company’s HR department describe the company and open job positions on the internet in real time.

Job applicants can asks questions in the live commerce chat room.

CJ CheilJedang and Lotte Shopping are sending young employees to interview job applicants instead of team managers.

CJ CheilJedang, which makes the Bibigo food brand, said it will send employees in their fourth through seventh years to interview job applicants next month.

The goal is to encourage the recruiters and job seekers to “freely communicate” and allow job seekers to “comfortably ask questions about job positions instead of unilaterally being asked questions” by the interviewers, according to the company.

But in the following rounds of interviews, job seekers will be interviewed by team managers.

Lotte Shopping, which recruited for Lotte Mart and Lotte Super last month, also sent employee in their 20s and 30s to interview job seekers.

“There are differences in how employees recognize new talent depending on their age,” said a spokesperson for Lotte Shopping, and the company wants to hire new talent that its young employees want to work with.

“Sending millennials and Generation Z staffers as job interviewers reflect [companies' realization] that evaluating new talent based on existing standards may no longer work,” said Kwon Soon-won, a business professor at Sookmyung Women’s University.

Young employees “can find potential in job candidates that cannot be recognized by senior employees. Such ways of recruitment process could become more prevalent.”

BY BAEK MIN-JEONG, JIN MIN-JI [jin.minji@joongang.co.kr]