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Aug 10, 2023 - Technology

Roblox plans to interview some job candidates inside Roblox

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A mock job interview inside the new Roblox Career Center. Screenshot: Robloc

The popular virtual world platform Roblox is planning to let some job applicants attend interviews virtually, as their avatars.

Driving the news: The interview option was announced as part of the unveiling today of the virtual Roblox Career Center that the company is pitching as a way to extend its reach to a wider pool of applicants.

Details: The virtual interviews will be rolled out slowly to "a small number of early career candidates," a Roblox rep tells Axios, and will be opt-in.

  • Interviewees and interviewers will both attend an interview as their Roblox avatars and use voice chat, in conjunction with emotes, to communicate.
  • Interviewees will also be able to animate their characters based on how they move in front of their web cameras, to be more expressive, the rep said.
  • In an announcement blog, the company said the avatar interviews would be for the "initial" stage of the recruitment process.

Between the lines: Roblox officials say their virtual career center is tailored toward early career applicants who are comfortable with the platform because, for many, they grew up using it.

  • Those kinds of applicants, the company wagers, will be comfortable researching Roblox history in the center's library or heading to a virtual room dedicated to "problem-solving assessments."
  • The center, by nature of being virtual and accessible anywhere in the world, is "eliminating geographic constraints from the recruiting process," the company said in a post.

State of play: For Roblox, avatar job interviews may further its image as a virtual-world leader.

  • People continue to flock to the platform. Roblox reported 65.5 million daily active users for the spring quarter.
  • But revenue, for a virtual economy tied to user-led creations, disappointed investors this week, leading Roblox's stock price to dive 20%.

The big picture: Roblox's virtual job interviews fit within a broader tech push to move activities customarily performed in the physical world into the so-called metaverse.

  • That concept, hotly promoted by Meta in recent years with ideas like company meetings conducted via avatar, stretches back to PlayStation Home's mid-2000s concept of watching movies together in a virtual theater or even early 2000s concerts staged in Second Life.
  • Uptake for such carry-overs from the physical world has been limited.

The bottom line: Roblox is trying anyway.

  • "This is an exciting time for us to test and understand the future of recruiting across both behavioral and technical interviews," the Roblox rep tells Axios.

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