Imagine going for a job interview and knowing exactly what your potential office looks like and even which desk you could be sitting at in future. 

Virtual reality opens new windows to hiring.  With the ability to take tours and experience the potential workplace, you are giving job seekers an extra level of depth to imagine their potential growth at a company.  (And also saving time and money within the recruitment process if they don’t like what they see.)

The potential of VR to help job seekers to make confident and appropriate career decisions is huge. I’m 23 and I set up Weavee because of my own personal experience as a graduate jobseeker with a degree in Computer Science.  Every time I tried to find a new job via recruiters it was always the same frustrating and lengthy process.

Our Weavee Discovery Companion algorithm will allow job seekers to see all around them in 360, reach out to roles and explore more about any role they are interested in.  Through this we will become the recruitment platform able to drive job seekers to learn more about their role before any interviews and at the same time, using our personality appraisals, we provide valuable detailed data about each job hunter, matching them to a role far more effectively than just a simple posting of the CV.

Streamlined process

Today’s IT industry relies less on jobs for life and more on short-term contracts and interim placements, so there is a huge need to streamline recruitment processes.  Weavee saves huge amounts of time for everyone involved; aiming to reduce the UK’s average snail’s pace 68 day time to hire to only a few days.

For employers the advantage is that by reinforcing a job seeker’s decision in the early stages of prospecting you are increasing the chance that they take your company over others. By improving the onboarding process, from acquisition to affirmation you are also increasing the likelihood that the employee stays within the company and talent is retained.

To do this we are looking at the existing experience of:

• Spending long hours trying to talk to a potential employer directly
• Signing up with every recruitment agency to try to find a job which suits
• Signing up and searching through every known job site and recruitment app

At Weavee we have our own theory, and we want VR to become a huge part of the process via helping job seekers to:

• Discover their skills and value
• Match with only the jobs their want and can do
• Experience the jobs before they apply

Surveys show that a huge proportion of people are unhappy at work or regret their career choices. The proportions differ based on generation, but a clear trend remains. Job satisfaction is low and people often regret the choices they have made for themselves.

Almost all of my time being in the recruitment world was spent talking to recruitment agents. People who spend their time collating as much data as possible to be able to quickly put a person into a role when the need arrives.

In theory this works, however in reality only 10% of my personal time was actual leads and the rest was “looking for your current situation”. Often days of calls would lead to nothing.

When I began discussing this problem with others and reading articles online I noticed that more and more people like me have this same situation, but with different conditions.

The search for talent

More than twenty thousand recruitment agencies in the UK facilitate the staffing needs of businesses large and small, each using the same or similar processes to get a person from point A to point B . However, with such a long time taken to get hired in the UK, the confidence of a job seeker to make that change is lower than it should be.

This problem is not limited to the job seekers. It is also the same on the employer side. Almost half (80%) of small businesses cannot find the qualified talent that they require.

With Weavee we are creating a new platform with candidate experience at the forefront. Virtual reality provides a huge opportunity that can be used by job seekers to inform their career choices, educate and help to make more informed decisions upon the role they will undertake in a more immersive and effective manner. The advantages for employers are huge and its the reality we want to provide with our new recruitment website Weavee.

Sources:

• https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/jun/22/skills-gap-small-business-qualified-staff
• https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/onboarding-key-retaining-engaging-talent.aspx
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/09/trails-of-2016-job-low-satisfaction-company-short-termism
• http://www.nfib.com/Portals/0/pdf/sbet/sbet201512.pdf