As a recruiter I’ve been hearing a lot about how big corporations and recruiters alike have begun setting up shop in Second Life trying to woo the supposed 9 million people who sometimes reside there to buy their products or even come to work for them. Of course, I’ve also heard the funny stories including the one about the guy (his avatar is a blond women) who inadvertently handed the interviewer a beer instead of his resume.

Of course that story might not be quite real, and because of this built in fudge factor (not really lying, but creating a false impression of who you are by altering your reality) I wonder why companies who try to weed out this same action during a real interview process (with various levels of success) would purposely invite someone to lie to them in the hopes of finding a quality employee. So why not bite the bullet and do the hard work of finding employees through cultivating your real life processes? Sure people still aren’t a 100% truthful, but I find that they have a much more difficult time perpetuating some falsehood about themselves when you meet them in person.

So until the percentage of people actually spending time there goes WAY UP or there is a better way to get at the truth with these candidates I’ll be biting the bullet and doing it the hard way, and may I suggest that you leave Second Life to people looking for an escape from the reality of the real world.