ScopeAT

For someone who’s spent a lot of time at campus career fairs, Alex Korine isn’t a fan. The senior global operations lead at tech firm Capgemini likens them to speed dating. “The model is volume intensive,” he says. “Thousands of people are forced into one place to have forced conversations about their careers. It was never a way to make a real connection.” 

Virtual campus career fairs, necessitated by the pandemic, weren’t much better. In some ways, Alex says, they were worse: “It was such a bad implementation. You have a two-minute conversation with a candidate on Zoom or Teams, then that person gets rolled out and the next person comes in. There’s no open discussion, no freedom. We had zero success.”

Rather than wallow in their frustration, the team saw an opportunity. VP and global lead of talent acquisition Ajay Sah issued them a challenge: Reimagine Capgemini’s approach to campus recruitment using augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR).

What if you could design a career fair that was unbound by physical space yet allowed you to do all the things you could do IRL — connect with students, network, hold private individual conversations? 

The team procured Oculus headsets and quickly got to work. Nine months later, on April 13, Capgemini hosted its first college career fair in the metaverse, the first of its kind in North America. Around 75 students from five universities joined the four-hour session. They designed avatars, donned VR goggles (or logged onto their laptops for the 2D version), and, from the comfort of their home or dormitory, walked through the virtual doors of Capgemini to meet face to face with recruiters. Here’s how Capgemini pulled it off.

Step one: Pick a platform

Saying you want to create a virtual world to improve campus recruitment is one thing, but actually doing it is quite another. “We’re not 3D designers,” Alex says, “we’re operations people. But we’re good at figuring things out.” 

The first thing they figured out is that there are many versions of the metaverse, depending on which platform you use. The team spent months exploring different products to understand the capabilities and customizations before finally settling on Microsoft AltspaceVR. 

One function they found most helpful was the ability to leverage user-generated content. Instead of designing everything from the ground up, Alex says, “we were able to take a little bit from Developer A, a little bit from Developer B, all posted on these open forums and, in a sense, build our world out.” 

The broader challenge was designing a space that felt familiar to college students. “We needed it to look like a career fair,” Alex says. “Because you’re in the metaverse, there’s already a big learning curve. We didn’t want there to also be a learning curve to how the event worked.” 

After months of design optimizations, what emerged was a virtual representation of a typical campus career fair, with recruiter booths and cheery signage — Ask Us About Our Open Roles! —  albeit with a few bells and whistles thrown in: dartboards, basketball hoops, a resident dog. “We’re big dog people,” Alex says. “We had to have a dog.”

Step two: Get the word out   

Of course, once you build it, there’s no guarantee they will come. To ensure a good turnout, the Capgemini team partnered with campus career centers to promote the event. They reached out to five universities — Pace University, University of South Carolina, Northeastern Illinois University, Northern Illinois University, and Stony Brook University — in regions where the company was hiring students.

“We were initially flooded with questions,” says Danielle Amaddeo, a talent acquisition specialist at Capgemini. “‘What do you mean, metaverse?’ they asked. We had a lot of virtual meetings. They were trying to wrap their brains around it, the same way we were.”

All five schools agreed to take part in the pilot, and one — Northeastern Illinois University — even purchased headsets for students to use. 

Unlike with most big campus recruitment events where you interact with a wide range of students, a virtual fair allowed recruiters to target precisely the kinds of attendees they wanted to meet: primarily seniors in the technology space.

The team then worked with the career centers to get the word out, creating everything from flyers and emails to an RSVP link. Students who registered received detailed instructions on how to download Altspace and set up their VR so that there wouldn’t be technical difficulties the day of the fair.

And, aside from the occasional armless avatar, there wasn’t. On a quiet Wednesday morning in the metaverse, dozens of students filed into a sun-filled room, chatted with recruiters and with each other, asked questions, listened, and for a little while, maybe, as they gazed out the window to an endless valley of sandstone cliffs, pondered what their future might look like.  

The takeaway

From a brand recognition standpoint, the event was a success. “We didn’t have a hiring goal in mind,” says global recruitment operations leader Meghan McNeil Gavin, who was overseeing the project. “Our goal was just to be innovative, try something new, and create partnerships with the schools.” All five universities have already followed up about doing individual fairs at their schools.

“This was really about setting the stage,” Alex says. Now that much of the build-out is created, and the learning curve has shrunk, he sees an easy path toward future success. 

Another metric of success was the amount of buzz the company received in the wake of the fair. After the event, attendees were encouraged to share their experience on social media, under the hashtag #CapgeminiMetaverseCareerFair. 

Many did, including Nayana Mahajan, a grad student at Pace University’s school of computer science. In a LinkedIn post from April, she talked about attending the first ever career fair in the metaverse: “It was a very different experience and I got to step into a future world.” 

Below is a screenshot of her avatar the day of the fair, a confident looking young woman with short brown hair, large almond-shaped eyes, and unattached arms. She adds: “Ignore my avatar, I was still learning…!! #opportunity.”

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