No need to dress up for job interviews in the metaverse

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No need to dress up for job interviews in the metaverse

SK Telecom held a recruitment event on its metaverse platform ifland last September. [SK TELECOM]

SK Telecom held a recruitment event on its metaverse platform ifland last September. [SK TELECOM]

 
If you are looking for a job, you might need to prepare an avatar of yourself for an interview in the metaverse.
 
Yook So-young, 27, is working as a manager at a 7-Eleven branch in Incheon International Airport. To land the job in November, Yook had an online interview on metaverse platform Gather last October, completed a one-month internship and then had a final normal video interview with executives. 
 
“Offline interviews can be really frustrating because you can be nervous,” says Yook. “I enjoyed the metaverse interview because it created a friendly environment for interviewees to communicate with not only the interviewers but also other applicants.”
 
February is the hiring season in Korea, and companies are adopting the metaverse as a hiring tool with blinding speed.  
 
“SK Telecom plans to hire new employees three times this year,” said a spokesperson for the company. “We are considering holding a recruitment fair on our metaverse platform, as we did last year.”
 
Last September, SK Telecom hosted a recruiting event where job seekers could consult with recruiters on its metaverse platform ifland.
 
Samsung Electronics has scheduled its second  metaverse recruiting fair for March. The company first applied metaverse technology to the hiring process last year. LG Electronics also launched a metaverse platform to hold a recruiting event in the latter half of last year, and plans to hold another in March as well.
 
Shinsegae's e-commerce arm SSG.com built a virtual training center dubbed SSG Town on Gather, and new hires by the company will be trained on the metaverse platform in the first half of this year.
 
Applicants are warming to the use of the new technology. 
 
In a survey conducted by recruitment website JobKorea last December, 51 percent of 390 job seekers born between 1985 and 2010 were positive about metaverse platforms being used in the hiring process for such things as interviews.
 
“Recruiters can evaluate applicants’ competence via the metaverse, as they can give presentations or share their portfolio through the online platform,” said Oh Sung-eun, an advisor at the Seoul National University Career Development Center.
 
Metaverse platforms are also useful for blind recruitment, which refers to reviewing applicants based on job competency and not personal factors such as their gender, race or age, said Oh.
 
Other notable hiring trends this year include a rolling recruitment system.
 
The traditional biannual mass hiring system is giving way to something more flexible, with a growing number of companies using a rolling recruitment system. They hire new employees when the need arises. Incruit found Tuesday that 68 percent of large companies say they prefer to hire new employees when they actually need them.
 
Job search website Incruit found that 73 percent of large companies are planning to hire four-year college graduates, up 16.8 percentage points from the previous year when the Covid-19 pandemic slowed down the job market.
 
Moreover, 25 percent of big companies said that they will hire more than 100 employees this year, a 17.6 percentage point jump compared to 2021. Big name companies such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are expected to lead the competition for talent.
 
On the other hand, only 49.5 percent of medium-sized companies said they will post job openings this year, a 6.1 percentage point increase compared to the previous year. For small-sized companies, the number was 46 percent, up 13.3 percentage points.
 

BY KIM KYUNG-JIN [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]
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