- What is extended reality?
- The benefits
- Proven success
The experience of meeting is sometimes overlooked in the process of recruitment for its importance in forming a candidate’s first impressions about their prospective future employer. A great impression can prove crucial in determining whether candidates will be motivated to see the entire recruitment process through. Today, having a seamlessly modern digital meeting experience is essential: 46 per cent of Gen Z applicants won’t even finish the initial process they find part of the recruitment process dated or cumbersome. It is in this environment that extended reality recruitment emerges – an ultra-modern and hyper-immersive solution to meeting that can dazzle applicants and put their soft skills to the test.
What is extended reality?
Extended reality (XR) is an umbrella term that encompasses virtual reality and augmented reality. The former involves the use of a headset to cover a candidate’s eyes and ears, and provides a 360-degree experience of a virtual environment. The latter entails the wearing of specialised glasses, or the use of a smartphone camera, to overlay the real world with a series of informative cues, text, and other useful information. Both offer immersive experiences that can enhance the professional meeting experience. Despite being ‘emerging’ technologies, their use of these XR solutions is becoming increasingly widespread. This attention from the professional world is why the VR space continues to grow exponentially – with some analysts anticipating 32 per cent in growth between 2022 and 2023 alone.
The benefits
There is no shortage of potential benefits to integrating XR into the meeting experience. Perhaps the most well-known of these is the immersion factor. VR is capable of inducing a phenomenon known as ‘presence’ – a feeling of truly inhabiting a location. Experiencing ‘presence’ increases the impact of an activity and significantly improves the user’s level of engagement. Think about how much more satisfying a candidate’s experience digitally ‘meeting’ their prospective future employer would feel if they, instead of using a video conferencing app, felt as though they were occupying the same space together.
Compared to other remote interviewing formats, XR can prove advantageous because it places both parties within the same ‘space’ and allows them to develop a ‘feel’ for each other. It also generates data, such as biometrics, which can be to generate quantitative knowledge about how the meeting went. It can also be paired with AI to generate deep insights about a candidate’s performance, including algorithmic methods of detecting whether a candidate is being honest through their face, body language and tone of voice. In addition to its utility to HR, this can help build an alluringly cutting-edge digital employer brand. For today’s discerning workforce, such a thing can really help a company stand out in a competitive job market.
Proven success
One company that has enjoyed success using XR technologies is Safeway. The firm specialises in fleet management and engineering, and needed an efficient solution for meeting which also allowed them to test prospective employees remotely on complex handling and shipping tasks – including the transport of live animals. Testing candidates out in such circumstances is challenging in real life for a wide number of reasons, but VR provided a workable solution. The experience was sufficiently lifelike and accessible that it worked, saving travel time for all candidates – successful or otherwise. For the company, this brought down costs substantially and improved the application experience, making it as seamless as possible. Because of the lack of transport and resources required to facilitate the experience, XR also had the pleasing effect of reducing the company’s carbon footprint.
Closing thoughts
When it comes to creating a great meeting experience, there are a lot of things which need to be gotten right. The process needs to be scalable to demand and yet consistent for all applicants. It needs to be intuitive, seamless and – critically – it needs to harness digital technology intelligently in order to satiate today’s discerning Gen Z workforce. XR technology meets all of these criteria, which is perhaps why its popularity is surging in the HR industry.
