Accenture using Second Life to Hire

Being in recruitment industry, I am always on the look out for interesting ways of companies hiring and see whether there is any innovative way that JobStreet.com could employ. (I know I blogged quite a bit on JobStreet.com, but I would say that it is because I really believe in what JobStreet.com is doing - Improving Lives Through Better Careers).

While some of you may point out some of the weaknesses of JobStreet.com, I definitely welcome those feedback. JobStreet.com is not perfect, and we are always striving to improve ourselves, and it is with your feedback, that we try to improve it.

Okie, back to this topic. This is an article that I found on how Accenture (yes, my previous company), in utilizing Second Life for recruitment. The link is here .

Fully quoted below and enjoy reading!

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Global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company Accenture has 180,000 employees and offices in 49 countries and brings thousands of new employees on board every year. As you might imagine, recruitment in a professional services company this size is a mission-critical business process. Accenture is already quite successful with new college grads — BusinessWeek named the company #8 in “Best Places to Launch a Career in 2007.” To even more effectively reach what the company thinks of as the “Facebook audience,” in March of 2008 Accenture launched a careers island in Second Life.

The island features fairly traditional-looking reception and meeting spaces designed to “feel like Accenture” and effectively represent the corporate brand in a way that is appropriate in Second Life. Accenture uses the island to network with prospective employees, answer questions job candidates have, and meet candidates that recruiters couldn’t easily get together with otherwise (e.g., students in universities Accenture couldn’t visit on a road show). The Accenture Careers island also offers a series of interactive games to engage peoples’ minds (e.g., memorize as many details about a complex picture as you can, or calculate the counterbalance required to catapult your avatar onto a landing pad) or encourage teamwork (e.g., balance your avatar on a disk while not knocking other avatars off their disks). Signage is available in six languages. To help Accenture marketing and HR folks easily leverage the island for their recruiting and networking events, the project team developed and distributed “how to” tools, templates (e.g., for marketing communications), and best practices information.

Many groups at Accenture had been dabbling in Second Life since the fall of 2006 – like Accenture Technology Labs, the Accenture Media Agency in Milan, and recruitment marketing teams in both France and the U.S. The Global Recruitment Marketing team, another early experimenter within the company, began to see a pattern in all the little successes and took the lead on assembling the necessary funds and talent to launch an island that could be used company-wide. In late July I spoke with Suzan L. Raycroft in Accenture Global Recruitment Marketing, who shared some insights into why Accenture considers this investment a success so far:

The centralized investment in the Second Life island paid for itself after 5-6 events. While the company doesn’t disclose the specific results of its marketing programs, it has found “a decent number of” hires through events held in-world. The investment in the island paid for itself after just 5 or 6 networking and recruiting events. (See the related ThinkBalm article, At Microsoft, cost of virtual events about 1/3 the cost of traditional events.) If you think about recruitment at Accenture taking place in 49 countries, and each of these countries using the Accenture Careers island rather than building its own, the cost savings really start to stack up. Also, recruiting becomes more standardized across the regions as people start to use the same materials and processes.

A critical success factor: a multi-faceted support program for internal users. Accenture has found that most recruiters are not yet comfortable going in-world, finding the candidate they’re supposed to meet with, escorting him or her to a private table, and having a successful text chat. So Global Recruitment Marketing put a lot of effort into making it easy for recruiters to use Second Life. The team holds meetings, calls, and tours with recruiters and created a guide on how to sign up in Second Life, create an avatar, walk, sit, chat, etc. The team sends out regular emails featuring best practices and alerting recruiting staff to new programs or tools. The department’s internal portal has a section dedicated to Second Life where the team posts what countries have done, results, what worked and didn’t, etc.

Accenture, like many other companies, has high hiring targets for tech-savvy people. Candidates display at least a modicum of technical skill if they can create Second Life accounts and relatively professional-looking avatars, find their way to the Accenture Careers island and the specific meeting location, and communicate with the recruiter via text chat or voice. And Second Life allows Accenture to interact with a geographically wide pool of prospective employees. Digital metrics provider comScore found that in March of 2007, 61% of active Second Life residents were from Europe, 19% from North America, and 13% from Asia Pacific.

While not a replacement (yet, anyway) for traditional recruitment techniques, Second Life as a recruiting and interviewing tool is a great enhancement for Accenture. In essence, the company is pre-qualifying its recruitment leads by ensuring that candidates have the needed technical skill and gaining insight into personal style and communication and social skills once a candidate reaches the island. And Second Life allows Accenture to leverage its global resources, recruiting and interviewing around the globe and around the clock.




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Would encourage any of my blog readers to share with me any event that you come across. As long as the event/activity/initiative is education/charity/youth oriented and is not-for-profit, I would be more than happy to post it to share!

Accenture Hiring in India

My former employer, Accenture, has been doing very well in India, ramping up thousands and thousands of employees.

Business Week wrote about them here

Full quotation of the article below
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The Analysis: Learning from Accenture

The author of Talent on Demand talks about what the consulting company did right in ramping up in India, and what it could have done better

Accenture's story is important in a lot of ways. Having to go to a new country or a new market and ramp up very quickly is something that a lot of companies are facing today. Sometimes it happens because you go to a new market where you haven't been before. Having to go to a new country or a new market and make changes to your talent pool is something a lot of companies are facing today.

This is different from 20 years or so ago, when demand was quite predictable. Then, you could more or less forecast 10 years out and determine what you were going to need on the talent side. Now these things change very quickly, and companies have to ramp up very quickly and scale back very quickly. It places huge demands on forecasting.

I think Accenture did a good job of getting up to speed very quickly in India. They did a lot of things right: They reached out to the community in various ways in terms of branding. They created their own human resources academy—a way to get the infrastructure necessary to get a lot of people in quickly and move them up. And they centralized their operations to get some scale economies and avoid duplications. All that is good.

The Cost of Being Wrong
There are some other things companies can think about. The first is to think about the difficulty in making these forecasts. These are huge bets and the human capital issues are a big part of it. Rather than just guessing and saying, "I think our best estimate is going to be we need this many people," a good idea is to develop some scenarios; some alternative versions of what we think we're really going to need. Often, we're guessing. We don't know for sure what demand is going to be. How many people do we think we're going to need? What are the odds of getting this many people? What happens if this assumption is wrong or that assumption is wrong? You end up tracing out something like a probability distribution, and saying, "Here are the odds it will be this much or that much." As a result, you get a much better sense of what the real demands will be, and you're less likely to make big mistakes.

The other way is one that comes directly out of supply chains. This is what I've been working on with my book, Talent on Demand. This is thinking about things like the cost of being wrong. Think about what happens if we have too many workers. What happens if we don't have enough? There are costs on both sides, and you want to try to minimize both of those.

I think another thing Accenture did that's interesting and that all companies need to focus on is different ways of attracting employees. They focused more on hiring people, but there are other approaches to getting employees which are more inspired by "just-in-time" supply chain logistics. It's more expensive per unit, but it helps you reduce the uncertainty. Relying on temporary workers and contract workers can help you close the gap with a little less risk.

Managing Bottlenecks
Another part of this is not just bringing people on—it's also getting that many people up to speed once you bring them in and developing them inside the company. Centralizing here is a good approach. Often companies have different units that are each hiring, and each unit makes mistakes. Maybe this unit has too many people or this one has too few people. If you're centralizing all this, you can use a portfolio approach. Some have too many, some have not enough. It cancels out.

I think there's another supply chain issue as well—managing bottlenecks. How many people can we actually bring on at one time? One of the ways companies can get better at this is to try to smooth out the process of bringing people in rather than hiring everyone all at once, say, right at graduation time. To do that, you need a huge capacity of onboarding for helping people get up to speed with the company's culture and for training and developing them. If you could hire even twice a year, then you need only half the capacity, half the training positions, half the supervisory time. Thinking about talent management like a supply chain, and bringing in some of a supply chain's lessons, can apply to moving people in and out of an organization.

Peter Cappelli is the author of Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, published by Harvard Business Press. He is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources.

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What you guys think of the policy of Accenture hiring in India? Do you think they hire fast enough? or they hire too fast? What would be the impact if there is a slowdown there? What is the best way to mitigate?

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Click here to read more of Chen Chow's posts

Would encourage any of my blog readers to share with me any event that you come across. As long as the event/activity/initiative is education/charity/youth oriented and is not-for-profit, I would be more than happy to post it to share!

Picking your brain on recruitment issue

With me going to move to my new career at JobStreet.com, which I posted here .

I would like to pick the brain of those who visit my blog for ideas. Hope to hear more ideas on the issue below, so as to help me jump start my career with a bunch of fresh ideas into it!

While JobStreet.com operates in a number of countries, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Phillipines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Japan, Vietnam and Hong Kong, I would like to focus on my understanding within Malaysia first.

a) Do you think that there is a mismatch between recruiters and job seekers?
b) If yes, what kind of mismatch exists?
c) If you are a college/university student, what are the challenges that you face in getting jobs? Be it full time or internship. What kind of resources and help that you feel that you need?
d) If you are a fresh graduate who are still looking for jobs, what are the common difficulties that you face? How long have you been in the search? Where does it get stuck? How can this problem get rectified?
e) If you are someone who is currently working, do you keep on looking for better options? Is it because of you wanting better jobs or you are not happy with your current employer? Do you get offers from time to time? What are the reasons you accept or reject them?
f) If you are recruiters, what are the issues you are facing? Why are there many ads in various medium, while jobseekers still look around for jobs? Is it because of skill mismatch? What kind of skills?

Above are some of the questions that I can think of. It is more to trigger your thoughts, and not expecting a a), b), c), d), e) ,f) sort of answer. Just feel free to write freely.

Those are my questions, to help me to jump start into this industry. It is not questions on behalf of my future employer. :)

Thanks in advance!

I am hoping to indirectly help to reduce a little unemployment rate in Malaysia, and any interesting/good idea that you have would be great!


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Click here to read more of Chen Chow's posts

Would encourage any of my blog readers to share with me any event that you come across. As long as the event/activity/initiative is education/charity/youth oriented and is not-for-profit, I would be more than happy to post it to share!