Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always seen similarities between the library profession and (hold onto your hat…..) IT (ok, no surprise there) as well as the military and police (ok, I’m fully prepared to discuss….). Why? Well, I guess because our profession has as many stigma and stereotypes bogging it down as the police and the armed forces do. We also have practices and approaches that we’ve used for years that many in the profession are working hard to change.
So, I was quite interested to read that the Vancouver Police Dept is using Second Life as a recruiting place. YES! The police are facing a recruitment shortage – much like the library profession. “We needed to do things differently, and with the changes going on in society we wanted to attract a new class of applicants,” said McQuiggin. “We also wanted to differentiate ourselves and give applicants a reason to choose the Vancouver Police rather than other agencies.” That’s when the VPD came up with an innovative idea. As the new frontiers of the Web have become a second home to Generations X and Y, why not use these new frontiers as a means of recruiting?
And so it got me to think….are the faculties of information studies using Second Life to recruit students? Are libraries using Second Life to recruit new talent? Please let me know. I’d like to follow this, and I may be way behind on the organizations using SL for this purpose.
Continue reading Using Second Life as a recruiting platform – anyone doing this?