Can Second Life Help You Get Hired?

When I've talked about relocating, it has always been in reference to physically moving (meaning packing up all your stuff, your family and your pets) to another city. A real one. Once you take up residence in your new city, you leave your old one behind, after all you can't live in two places at once. Or can you? Well if one of your residences is the real world and one is a virtual world, you can live in two places at once. And that is the premise of Second Life, a virtual world, that has been around since 2003 and is increasingly gaining in popularity. Residents of this virtual world, who take on the persona of a self-created avatar, can own land, run businesses and attend events, all online.

According to a post on the blog WorkersWork.com, some people are also finding jobs on Second Life. This post quotes an article on Fortune.com: "the most radical dotcom 2.0 recruitment wave is happening in virtual reality thanks to Second Life. Instead of posting a resume on Monster.com that will hopefully net a flesh-and-blood job interview, your avatar can be interviewed and hired all within Second Life, often for jobs possible only in virtual reality." Ogilvy Interactive and Electric Sheep Company are two companies that have already recruited Second Life residents.

Imagine that! You can go to a job interview as your virtual self. Would you have to wear a virtual suit? All joking aside, there was a time when people poo-pooed the Web as a job searching tool. Then along came Monster.com and its cohorts. That wasn't all that long ago either, although in Web years, 12 or 13 years seems like a century. So, will finding a job in a virtual world become something so common we won't be able to remember a time when that wasn't the way things were done? And will relocating to another "city" while still living in the one we currently inhabit be a possibility?