Recruiting 3.0 in Open Wonderland

By Gery Winkler & Michel Denis

Gery Winkler, a visionary business designer based in Munich, has partnered with Michel Denis, an experienced virtual world expert based in South of France, to re-invent the recruiting process.

Figure 1- The Testament role-play for immersive recruitment

The war for talent is widely discussed in most developed countries. Multinationals have to find new ways to attract and assess talent globally. While face-to-face role-play activities are used in assessment centers to evaluate soft skills of applicants, social media and VoIP are increasingly common tools for recruiters to interact with candidates remotely.

Some major recruiting challenges today include:

• Competing for the best brains,
• The need to reduce costs and improve efficiency,
• The digital divide between recruiter and applicants, and
• A war for talent that is going on at an international level.

At the same time there are major technological trends:

• Social networking for recruiting is being widely adopted,
• Gamification of processes has begun in HR areas, and
• Immersive Internet games are played by many people.

ImmerHire (http://www.immerhire.com/), the French-German start-up, merges virtual world technology with role-playing and storytelling to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the recruiting process.

With Recruitment 3.0, immersive hiring is now possible. Virtual assessments, collaborative role-plays, and engaging serious games are all accomplished in 3D on an Open Wonderland platform.

Figure 2 – Survival on the Moon role-play (often used by recruiters)

ImmerHire, early movers in the recruiting space, provide customers with the opportunity to evaluate job applicants’ soft skills in an immersive environment. Role-plays and interactive stories help provide a sense of presence in this serious game and thus improve the quality of the assessments.  For example, an “in-tray” exercise helps to assess candidates’ organizational skills. Virtual survival games, such as the one shown in Figure 2, test candidates’ logical thinking skills, and conflict-management role-playing activities such as a “castle under siege” game, test candidates’ negotiation skills. The “Testament” role-playing activity (Figure 1) in which participants have to determine what to do after a wealthy uncle has died, allows candidates to demonstrate their social skills.

ImmerHire on Open Wonderland brings several benefits to corporations, including a more efficient and more effective recruiting processes, as well as early mover advantages. The ImmerHire environment also provides companies with the opportunity to embed their own branding.

Want to know the sales skills of a candidate? Just ask him or her to sell a fridge to an Eskimo … in Wonderland !

Figure 3 – Can you sell a fridge to a Wonderland Inuit ?

Wonderland Showcase – iED Boston 2012

By Nicole Yankelovich

At that Immersive Education conference in Boston last month, eight Open Wonderland community members from 6 different countries joined me remotely to show off their work. Here’s a brief summary of the worlds and features presented during the showcase. In all cases, the presenters have agreed to leave their spaces running on the community server. If you missed the conference, you can explore the spaces on your own. Simply log on to the community server and use the Placemarks menu to navigate to the different spaces.

WonderBuilders Outpatient Clinic

I began the session by showing one of the simulated medical spaces created by my company WonderBuilders.

WonderBuilders Outpatient Clinic

This virtual outpatient clinic is designed for communications skills training. Each of our virtual clinical spaces comes with a soundproof observation room with one-way windows so that instructors and others can observe students during role-playing scenarios. This space also features a non-player character that speaks, a poster with links to different portions of the space, an App Frame for organizing documents, and pop-up questions using a modified version of the Sheet Suite developed jointly by WonderBuilders and the University of Missouri.

+Spaces

Michael Gardner from the University of Essex talked about the +Spaces (pronounced “positive spaces”) EU-funded project aimed at engaging citizens in policy-making. Michael showed excerpts from this role-play video:

To learn more about the use of role playing in the +Spaces project, as well as the Wonderland modules developed as part of this project, see these previous WonderBlog articles or search the blog for articles by “Bernard Horan.”

Entrepreneur Space

Johanna Pirker from Graz University in Austria took us on a tour of the space she created for teaching entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneur Space from Graz University

This space includes an informal area for students to get to know one another, an area for presentations, and a work area where students, mentors, and instructors can collaborate.

WonderSchool

Roland Sassen demonstrated WonderSchool, an on-line school that takes advantage of Wonderland’s ability to run shared applications within the virtual world.

WonderSchool with the Alice programming environment.

Roland demonstrated how he can teach students to use complex software such as the Alice programming environment from within the virtual world. He also demonstrated other dynamic applications running remotely inside a VNC Viewer window.

Seekers School Maze

Chris Derr, head of the Seekers School, talked about using Wonderland in his innovative curriculum to motivate kids who have had difficulty in other school situations.

Seeker School student activities

The students spent the past semester learning how to build Open Wonderland worlds, including making their own 3D models in SketchUp and creating simple animations using Wonderland’s EZScript capability. Among other things, the students created a fun maze, mountain climbing challenges, and a colorful spinning roof.

iSocial

Ryan Babiuch from the University of Missouri iSocial project showed one of the many learning spaces used as part of their curriculum for remotely teaching social competency skills to students with autism spectrum disorders.

iSocial space used in teaching students with autism.

This curriculum was pilot tested this past semester in two schools. While the data has not yet been fully analyzed, the initial results were extremely positive.

ImmerHire

Michel Denis and Gery Winkler from ImmerHire showed the Survival on the Moon space they use to help assess logical thinking skills.

ImmerHire – Assessing logical thinking in the Survival on the Moon scenario.

The ImmerHire environment is intended to help employers evaluate communication, personal, and social skills of job applicants using a range of virtual role-play activities.

STCC Virtual Campus

Kristy Perry, an English-as-a-second-language (ESL) professor at Springfield Technical Community College, showed one of the spaces she designed on the STCC Virtual Campus.

STCC Virtual Campus – patio

This patio space is intended as a venue for small group projects and conversation practice. The STCC Virtual Campus will be deployed for Level 2 ESL students starting in September.

Wonderland Wednesday Projects

Jonathan Kaplan, our Wonderland architect, demonstrated the three Wonderland Wednesday community projects that he has lead. These projects – Telepointers, EZMove, and Subsnapshot Import/Export – were all developed collaboratively on the Open Wonderland community server. In the weekly Wonderland Wednesday meetings, developers worked together using NetBeans and other shared applications.

Telepointer demonstration

The new Telepointers are considerably more aesthetically appealing than the old telepointers. More importantly, they now work when you have control of a 2D application. For multi-user applications such as the Whiteboard, this is particularly helpful as it allows users to see where everyone else is working.

Be sure to visit the community server to see these spaces and try out the set of Wonderland Wednesday features.