The rebranding of Facebook to Meta on 28th 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 organizations 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 toward 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.

Sources

https://www.globalnetbit.com/featured/a-basic-introduction-to-metaverse-and-its-advantages/

https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo-metaverse-interview

https://zety.com/blog/hr-statistics

https://www.jobscan.co/blog/99-percent-fortune-500-ats/

https://www.employmentking.co.uk/interviews/what-will-a-job-interview-in-the-metaverse-look-like/#:~:text=Job%20Interviews%20Conducted%20in%20the%20Metaverse%20It%20is,will%20be%20able%20to%20%E2%80%98show%20off%E2%80%99%20their%20competencies

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Use AI for the Right Reasons

Separate the purpose of your business project from the reason you’re using AI, and make sure AI is not only necessary to achieve it, but the best means to doing so. Marketing departments can be keen to claim a product is “powered by AI”, but can find it harder to explain how that translates into benefits for a customer. Business leaders can be guilty of the same thing, wanting to use AI in projects for the sake of using AI.

Part of the difficulty in deciding whether AI is the right technology to solve a business problem is that it’s not necessarily clear what AI actually means, and boundaries with other technologies can be blurry. AI covers a diverse range of applications, several of which don’t have much in common. AI is often used to analyze data and forecast likely consequences of decisions, although this is also the territory of “Big Data”. Another common use is the automation of business activities that would previously have needed human input, for example, posting transactions to ledgers. Computer vision is a familiar type of AI, for example, recognizing objects or faces in-camera images. A version of this is document management, in which the contents of printed and hand-written documents are scanned and converted into computer content. Closely related to this is natural language processing, whereby computers extract the meaning from the text as well as audio speech. Robotics is the final type of AI in common use, from robot vacuum cleaners to self-driven cars.

In practice what you call the technology doesn’t matter as long as you have clarity on what you want to use it to do. Which brings us to the next tip.

Use AI for the Right Problem

There is almost no limit to the ways AI could be used in large businesses, and even SMEs have many potential opportunities to use AI. However, the reality is that most of the time it’s used to address a handful of types of problem.

One of the most common is improving our understanding of customers, both individually and collectively. AI can help generate insights about products customers prefer and ways they like to choose and buy them. It can also flag early signs of customer dissatisfaction and potential churn.

A less specific use of AI is making better decisions that rely on data. The type of decision can vary tremendously, but can cover anything from shortlisting CVs of prospective employees to setting the optimal discount to offer a customer. The key is decisions that can be made or improved by sifting through lots of data.

AI can be important in product development, potentially adding competitive advantage to features of a product or service. Many startups, with the advantage of agility and speed, have come to market on the basis of using AI to offer something larger, more established competitors can’t provide.

One of the biggest uses of AI in larger firms is intelligent automation, sometimes known as RPA (Robotic Process Automation), and allows AI to introduce step changes in efficiency, speed, and scale of tasks.

There are many other possible uses of AI in business, and an internet search for “AI Use Cases” will give you a sense of these. But most examples cater to large corporates with deep pockets, and smaller businesses need to approach AI differently from larger ones. An important starting point is deciding whether to build or buy, which is what the final tip is about.

Don’t Build AI Unless Really Necessary (Buy or Rent Instead)

Much advice for business leaders about AI focuses on overseeing the creation of effective AI business solutions. However, as the AI market has evolved, the option of buying pre-built AI solutions or configuring part-built AI applications has become increasingly common.

In fact, the introduction of AI features into commonly used software means many businesses have already started using AI without realizing it. For example, many CRM applications routinely use AI to help users target customers, design campaigns, and even draft emails. This means that the distinction between an AI business project and a regular technology business project is diminishing. As a result, once you have clarity on what your business problem is and how you want to use AI to solve it, you may well find the features you need have already been incorporated into mainstream software used in the same business area.

If that’s not the case, it’s also possible that a separate AI solution has already been built, and your AI business project is then about evaluating pre-existing solutions and adopting the one that most closely suits your needs. Most of these are likely to be available through cloud subscriptions, so it may even be possible to try different options and select based on actual use.

Was Rahman is an expert in the ethics of artificial intelligence, the CEO of AI Prescience, and the author of AI and Machine Learning. See more at www.wasrahman.com

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