Zeeon: The Future of Recruitment in Metaverse with Dima Lylyk

Music:  This is RecruitingDaily’s Recruiting Live podcast, where we look at the strategies behind the world’s best talent acquisition teams. We talk recruiting, sourcing, and talent acquisition. Each week, we take one overcomplicated topic and break it down so that your three year old can understand it. Make sense? Are you ready to take your game to the next level? You’re at the right spot. You’re now entering the mind of a hustler. Here’s your host, William Tincup

William Tincup:  Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup and you are listening to the RecruitingDaily Podcast. Today, we have Dima on from Zeeon, and we’re going to be talking about the future of recruitment in Metaverse. And, obviously, everyone’s been following the news of Facebook and Microsoft both kind of announcing their different versions of Metaverse and what they’re doing. It’s very, very appropriate for us to be talking about it. And we’ve got an expert to talk with it about. Dima, would you do us a favor, the audience a favor and introduce both yourself and Zeeon?

Dima Lylyk:  Sure. Thank you for having me today here, William.

William Tincup:  Sure.

Dima Lylyk:  About Zeeon. We are building a Metaverse for public talks and co-working, and that allows companies to host their virtual spaces in a Metaverse and it also allows their employees to explore the world around their virtual office and do connections to network with people to get education and do what we would regularly do in the offline environment.

William Tincup:  Let’s talk about Metaverse for just a second. For those not as steeped in the subject as you are, is Metaverse singular or is Metaverse plural, meaning are there multiple different versions of Metaverse?

Dima Lylyk:  The original term was singular. But what we are seeing today, it seems like there will be multiple Metaverses. And the beauty of that is that they will be interchangeable and interconnected. As a user, you will have access to multiple Metaverses, and you might access those Metaverses with a single profile, with a single avatar. For example, if you create some skins or custom clothing, or just any information about your avatar and your personality, you can share that among multiple Metaverses. And for example, you might have office environment in one Metaverse and you can log to a music party with the same skin and with the same avatar in a different Metaverse. It is still not there, but it feels like the market will go that direction and that everything will be open. It seems like Metaverses will not limit themselves. I mean, they will not limit users to a single Metaverse.

William Tincup:  Right. Again, for the audience, Metaverse is also using VR and AR or functionality of both VR and AR as well?

Dima Lylyk:  As well. You might access Metaverse either from laptop, or from a mobile device or from VR and AR devices. When we are talking about laptops, it looks like a regular video game, which is available on your computer and the same with mobile devices. But, when we talk about VR headsets, then you have this truly immersive experience where you feel being present in a different space and meeting people as you would normally do in offline environment. And when we are talking about AR experience, it creates some mixed reality because you can see your offline surrounding, and you can see other people who are physically far from you, but you see how their virtual projections fit into your physical environment.

William Tincup:  Right. Now that we you’ve got a baseline for Metaverse, the future of recruitment. Recruitment outside of Metaverse, stated and covered, what do you think the kind of the tenants or some of the entry points of what recruitment looks like in Metaverse?

Dima Lylyk:  It will look very similar to current experience because the technology just provides new ways, but the process is how we do recruitment. They remain the same. Even before digital recruiters and hiring managers would go out and find people and talk to them and make offers and discuss how people would join the company. With internet, the same scheme remained unchanged, but people started finding other peoples, not by going into fields, but through social networks like LinkedIn. When we are talking about Metaverse and recruitment in Metaverse, the scheme will remain the same, but you will have access to other people through the Metaverse.

Dima Lylyk:  The way how we see that at Zeeon and how we enable recruitment in Metaverse is that we provide an office for a company, which is located in an open world where other offices are also located and where conferences are happening. Some educational hubs are happening and the recruiters of a company can go out from their virtual office and meet other people in different locations. For example, they can go out to a conference and do network in there, or they can go to, let’s say, partly in the forest and meet their potential hires there as well.

William Tincup:  So, one of the things that I love about this is it’s a different way to source talent. You can find talent and you can find talent in a different place and sourcers and recruiters love finding new ways to find talent. I love that. How do you believe skills and experience will be rendered or is rendered in Metaverse for candidates? How are they going to showcase what they’re able to do or what they have done?

William Tincup:  LinkedIn, it’s flat, right? You can just go through their profile and you can see keywords and you can see all this stuff and there’s biases and there’s problems with that. I’m not suggesting that that’s the right way, but how do you kind of see at that developing where a person can render their skills and experience and maybe even passions and things like that in Metaverse?

Dima Lylyk:  Yes. That’s a very good question. Anyways, there will be some form of 2D with information because that’s how people consume information. That’s how we consume text. And even before digital people were reading CVS on paper. That’s how we are used to learn something new about a person. For sure, when a recruiter will be hiring a person, there will be some sort of CV or some sort of just regular information, but the beauty of Metaverse is that when we talk about LinkedIn, the candidate has the full power over his or her profile. And you are not really sure if that information is realistic.

Dima Lylyk:  What we can do in Metaverse is add an additional layer, which will show what type of conferences this person is attending, how active that person is, how many connections in the field and in the specific industry this person makes, did that person take part in some hackathon? Did that person take part in social projects happening in Metaverse? It seems to me like the next stage of recruitment and presenting information about candidate will be not just by typing information, but by actively performing in Metaverse and that will be displayed to recruiters when they meet you.

William Tincup:  Yeah. It’s really interesting because it’s been my experience on the VR side, going to a virtual conference and seeing virtual training is it’s experiential. You get to experience the job. Train and kind of see if you simulate the job and things like that. Especially with certain different job classes, I think it’s really interesting to just go and experience the job before you even think to apply.

Dima Lylyk:  Yes. That’s also a way for young talent to find themselves and to find which job resonates with them. So they can take part in various small projects and try engineering or try some farming, or try coding with other people. And because we can simulate any environment and any job processes, and from there, a person can understand what feeds best and what resonates and how to develop a few next years of their career and everything the person does and learns will be represented as a part of their profile.

William Tincup:  Is Metaverse, in the future, do you think it has an element of blockchain in the sense of kind of reducing fraud?

Dima Lylyk:  Yes.

William Tincup:  Tell me about that.

Dima Lylyk:  Yes. We are already designing our techonomics and we will be implementing our blockchain because we understand that that’s the future. And there are so many possibilities how to implement blockchain and how to make it valuable for any part of the business. For example, when we talk about hiring, not recruitment, but already hiring, we can do smart contrasts between a company and employee. When we talk about profiles at the recruitment stage, everything, what I said before might be done with blockchain, where every achievement of a candidate is a different token, which represents the unique experience this person has.

William Tincup:  And it’s been validated. You get all the fraud. I don’t know about fraud, but the hype, how people kind of maybe overstate what they’re good at. Blockchain, one of the beauties of it, is, especially if they’ve earned it and been validated, it’s true. You guys can actually trust it. There’s a lot of conversations today on biases and recruitment biases in particular, and how do you reduce recruitment bias in a normal process. We’re not even talking about Metaverse. What do you see in Metaverse as it relates to hiring bias and recruitment bias? Has it either makes it better? Is there something that can kind of worries you? Where do you see that intersection of recruitment bias in Metaverse?

Dima Lylyk:  Recruitment bias will remain the same when we talk about human to human conversations, because bias is something very deeply in human nature and we cannot reduce that with technology. What we can do with technology is to provide, when we are talking about sourcing talent, then we can provide unbiased least of candidates who fit best. But at the moment, when a recruiter will start a conversation, then bias might happen. Also, there are some experiments in the field around chatbots and artificial intelligence that does the screening to eliminate bias in recruitment. And we think about implementing that. It might have really great potential, but from my personal experience and from what I have learned about that technology, it has not proved any significant results yet, but still, it seems like a very promising technology for the future.

William Tincup:  You know what, the one I love about Metaverse in this sense is you can create your own. Like with avatars, you can create an avatar that isn’t you. If you’re worried about bias, for some reason you can cloak some of that and put a different persona of yourself in front of people. Maybe even cloak your voice, as well, if you’re talking to somebody. So that if there is a bias, you can cloak that in a way that you can’t do when you’re face to face with somebody in an office environment.

Dima Lylyk:  Agreed. What we are currently doing, we provide every user with a possibility to customize their avatar and customize their looks. You might look realistic similar to how you do in real life, or you can look completely different. The choice is up to you. But what I’m thinking here, the bias about the look of a person is rather an ethical issue.

Dima Lylyk:  It seems like we are passing over at that. There are all these new great trends, like body positive, and that you do not charge people by their look or by the country they come from, their accent and so on. The world is becoming more and more open and inclusive. I don’t really feel like there will be this problem. Even though, we still have some traces of that problem from the past. It seems like we are getting to a brighter future where those biases based on how a person looks will just fade away.

William Tincup:  Yeah. I feel the same way, actually. I think that not just a push for inclusion, but just really companies wanting it and talking more about it, but really candidates are just demanding it. It doesn’t matter if someone’s based in the UK or whether or not they’re handicapped or disabled or whether or not they’re a veteran or whatever, male, female, whatever. However you want to think of how we’ve differentiated, delineated people in the past. I see candidates and employees just not caring about that as much, which enables the business then say, okay, well then the world, and COVID also pushed some of this, faster than we probably expected, because now you can apply to a job anywhere in the world, which I think helps Metaverse conceptually, because if you can just get out of your four walls, like for me, I’m in the United States. If you can just get out of the four walls of the United States and started thinking about the world in a much more larger place, then you can think about Metaverse as well. It isn’t that far of a step, I guess.

Dima Lylyk:  Yes. And also what supports Metaverse development is that companies are switching to remote first culture and companies are becoming more and more global with distributed talent and with people joining from all places over the globe. And I think that’s amazing because that’s the way how we create that equation and how everyone becomes equal with equal possibilities. The trend was there. With COVID, COVID just embraced the trend and Metaverses will carry this trend and take it to the next level.

William Tincup:  How do folks get started? Someone that hasn’t experimented with Metaverse. We’ll talk to folks that have just never experienced any of this. Where do you suggest that they get started on their journey to recruit? Obviously the folks are going to be listening to this or want to be finding talent. How do they get started?

Dima Lylyk:  It’s very simple. If the person has never played games, I would suggest to play any game where you have a character who can move. Just for a couple hours to understand that you can navigate the virtual world. That’s pretty simple. And from there, everything is, very, I would say natural because think of yourself in a real environment, in some offline conference. You have your body and you direct your body to a person which attracts your attention. And you start a conversation and you ask questions, you learn about the person. You tell something about yourself, about your company. And we are taking that experience into Metaverse.

Dima Lylyk:  The only difference there is that you are not moving with your real body. You are just manipulating your avatar and you tell your avatar, go there, stand here, talk to this person. And from there, it’s something that everyone is already used to. We all know how to talk on internet. We know how to talk on Zoom and some other video conferencing tools. You just have a natural conversation and it flows. I don’t think there is something challenging for any person to start doing job in Metaverse and talking to people in Metaverse.

William Tincup:  Last question. As they start this journey, is there anything that they should avoid? Pitfalls? Advice that you would give them of things that they just shouldn’t do as they enter Metaverses, and they think about recruitment and they think about acquiring talent, et cetera?

Dima Lylyk:  It’s not about acquiring talent. It’s about choosing Metaverses. What I have discovered, a lot of companies want their office to be separated. They want to have their unique space where only their employees have access to. For example, we talk about conferences, organizers, and planners want some virtual space where nobody else has access to and only their entities can be there. A lot of companies who build Metaverse or who build virtual spaces for business, they follow that requirement. And if you do that, no recruitment is possible. You have no access to other people.

William Tincup:  You have closed it off.

Dima Lylyk:  Yes. I’ve been talking to companies and sometimes I see that they have this requirement for various reasons. For example, we don’t want others to interrupt. Or for example, if we have a conference attendee, we don’t want him or her to be able to go out and do something else.

Dima Lylyk:  For me, it’s quite strange because it’s not really a problem of technology. It’s a problem of people not being engaged with your content. When you have, let’s say a Zoom conference or some other conference, and if a person is not engaged, it’s very easy to mute yourself and start watching YouTube videos. It’s not about limiting a person in terms of what they can do and what they cannot do. My advice would be think open and think about limitless possibilities and provide those possibilities to all your employees, attendees, people you want to work with, and so on.

William Tincup:  This was wonderful. And again, first of many, because I want to actually do this as a series and really kind of understand Metaverses for folks and get them to understand it, because it is going to take a little while for HR and for recruiters to kind of get their minds around all these things. But, again, Facebook, Microsoft, everyone, making major announcements. I think it’s going to help speed up everyone’s kind of desire to learn. That’s great. Thank you, Dima. Thank you so much for carving out time and kind of breaking down some of the basics and essentials of the future of recruitment in Metaverse.

Dima Lylyk:  Thank you, William. I enjoyed this session. Thanks for the invitation.

William Tincup:  Absolutely. And thanks for everyone that listens to the RecruitingDaily Podcast, until next time.

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