Recruiting for the metaverse… and anything else where innovation is driving change!

Growing areas of tech or innovation creating recruitment challenges

Technology creates all sorts of problems for recruitment agencies. Choosing the right technologies to manage agency operations is critical. (More about that later).

One of the other big issues is making hires based on experience, where a technology is fast emerging or growing. Naturally, where a technology is new, direct expertise may be thin on the ground. One such example of a technology which has a growing level of interest is the metaverse. “The What!?”

The metaverse is the formal tech industry name for any computer generated or virtual environment, such as immersive games or those that provide a non-competitive interactive social world. Perhaps the best known of these is Second Life, an online multimedia platform that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and have a second life in an online virtual adult world.

There has been a great deal of business interest in metaverse technology since the pandemic struck. Metaverse technology is able to enhance user experience in work based online activity and for personal use of the internet.

In the metaverse, people are able to work, play, collaborate, learn, attend virtual events, visit virtual stores, chat to virtual sales assistants and purchase physical and digital goods in real time. Progressive brands are particularly active in exploiting the future potential of the metaverse.

Second Life was founded in 2003, but there has been lot of movement in the multiverse world recently. One of significant importance was Facebook renaming to Meta Platforms Inc in October 2021. The company articulated a vision of the internet where people digitally connect through virtual-reality avatars or teleport to see places like ancient Rome. This helped trigger a metaverse investment craze.

This rapid progress has created a gap, so while there are opportunities for companies, agencies and IT workers, obtaining the correct person-to-role matches can be challenging.

Making the right hires in emerging areas of tech and business

Some key issues for recruiting such areas include:

• Qualifications and certification – A lack of established qualifications and certifications is to be expected when a technology is new or has rapidly emerged.
• Spotting those who are the ‘real deal’ – Some candidates may be smart, ethical and knowledgeable, however, some may try to talk their way in using a tenuous rationale that’s a stretch too far, or with ‘radical’ ideas.

So how do recruiters pick their way through the minefield? It’s not just about the metaverse, or even technology per se. This can be recruiting for any industry or sector where innovation may be driving change. Some key identifiers include:

• Soft skills and personality – Rather unsurprisingly, it comes down to the basics of good recruitment and assessing personality and soft skills. Even when recruiting in established areas – not just technology – qualifications and experience are not the sole determinants of who is the best fit. Proper assessment of soft skills and personality is a good place to start.
• Transferable skills – Of course with a yawning gap right across the employment market, there is a strong focus on transferable skills. With technology, new or fast emerging ones are usually extensions of existing technologies, so understanding what new ones are based on is a good place to start.
• Track record – Technology is strongly built on first principles, the basics of computing technology. A database will always be a database… an application will always be an application. (Hopefully!) Tech workers that demonstrate a wide knowledge of tech and have a track record of providing innovation and tangible results in other tech roles may be a good fit.

More efficient recruitment agency operations with ETZ

It’s impossible to manage agency operations efficiently and effectively without technology. But choosing and integrating the right RecTech can be taxing. Making poor decisions can cost time and money, as well as damaging competitive advantage.

ETZ is RecTech partner of choice, helping agencies obtain excellent value from technology.

Besides streamlining admin through software automation, our leading back office solution also acts as a hub, allowing you to integrate your other favoured applications, such as Xero and Quickbooks for accounting, as well as dedicated RecTech platforms such as JobAdder, further increasing efficiency and value.

To find out more about how we simplify the complexity of RecTech for agencies like yours, call us on 0800 311 2266 or book a demo.