Canadian HR Reporter

www.hrreporter.com 13 To date, CareerLabsVR has employed 15 different work scenarios that provide a jobseeker with a virtual look at various careers. In one case, it prevented a candidate from making a bad choice, says Meyer. "We have a residential electrician simulation and we had someone who realized, 'I can't tell my red from my yellow wires.' If this was something that you were looking to do as a career, [it's important to know] what is your capacity for colour differentiation?" she says. "You're able to have those moments prior to being on a jobsite or prior to spending money on training that you realize [this job] is not what you thought it was going to be." Soft skills assessments On the soft skills side, AlignVR in Edmonton has developed a VR assess- ment tool where job candidates move through a series of tasks, challenges and tests that evaluate their potential fit within an organization. It also prevents the candidate from engaging in impression management, which is when a potential hire "caters the answers so what you say is what you think the assessor wants to see," says cofounder and CEO Alex Rossol. VR can also be deployed for certain mini-training or refresher courses, according to Surbey. "We [covered] fatigue in the workplace and this was a very emotional piece because it's a bus crash. The character in this scenario is a bus driver in an industrial facility who had a long, hard day, made a bad choice on the road and ended up in a crash. We're able to build a lot of the emotion that goes around with that in the airspace." Career explorations Discovering whether a candidate is well suited for a particular career and fully aware of what is required is an example of how VR is being employed at the hiring stage. The Employment and Education Centre in Brockville, Ont., for example, uses VR to assist clients and students who are looking for extra guidance with career exploration, such as pipefitting, says Elisabeth Meyer, manager at CareerLabsVR, which is part of the centre. "We start with industry leaders and we talk to them and say, 'What are some of the most common tasks or skills that someone who's a pipefitter may do?' and we build our simulations around that," she says. "It's a way of finding out who someone really is or how they interact with others in team environments and also just interpersonally as well." By its nature, VR blocks out the outside world, he says, giving the hiring manager a peek into how the candidate might react when nobody is watching. " It 's v e r y i m m e r s i v e a n d a l l participants in the VR exercises entirely focus on the environment; they forget any assessors that are watching them and then entirely focus on the puzzles and not the evaluation," says Rossol. "They don't have all these social scripts to work off of impression management, which is managing the impression you have with someone so that you always try to have your best foot forward." VR not only benefits the company that is making the decision, he says, it can also smooth the process for the jobseeker. "An employee's first interaction with the company is almost always through the hiring manager, and that's a bit of a pressure cooker where you need to be on your best behaviour. By using VR, it's a positive interaction; candidates genuinely enjoy the exercises. It also reflects on [job candidates] that this is a very exciting company to work for," he says. "You could have people walk around your building and have them engaging in a team meeting with supervisors." Nora MacLachlan, Bow Valley College In the future, VR could become a valuable onboarding tool as well, says MacLachlan. "You could have people walk around your building and you could have them engaging in a team meeting with supervisors. With COVID, it's become even more apparent that we need that interaction. I hired an associate dean of nursing this last year and she's only been to the college once, and that's because I very purposely took her there. To have someone even walk around the building and become attached to their place of work, I think that's really important." CHRR A VR simulation at Bow Valley College in Calgary

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