How Will Metaverse Change Remote Work, Recruitment and Employer Brand?

How Will Metaverse Change Remote Work, Recruitment and Employer Brand?

For those who took up temporary residence under a rock while 2021 railroaded life itself, Facebook rebranded to ‘Meta’ as part of a move for rolling out the company’s new vision of a virtual-reality future.

What is The Metaverse?

In essence, The Metaverse is a virtual world accessed through a virtual-reality headset where people will transact, communicate and even trade with each other and digital 3D items.

Yes—we mean ‘transact’ and ‘trade’ as in ‘exchange money and goods or services’. In Meta’s ‘Metaverse’, currency can be used to buy and sell land, buildings, avatars, and even identities.

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Musicians will be able to perform virtual gigs, apparel companies will be able to create virtual apparel for people’s avatars to wear and global companies will do business, hold virtual meetings and even hire global talent—all in the Metaverse.

Essentially, your physical body will atrophy into a leathery husk propping up a VR headset, while your Meta avatar crushes it with a six-figure salary and virtual Ferrari.

How Will Metaverse Affect Recruitment and Employment?

Imagine a VR realm where career moves were on-tap.

Imagine recruitment agencies that don’t close. Imagine recruiters that never ghost you, even if your application wasn’t successful. Imagine gaining skills the real you could only dream of. These are feasible realities in the Metaverse.

How would employers and the recruitment industry deal with such a shift in work and recruitment paradigm?

The answer is that nobody truly knows right now—except perhaps the AI overlords who’ll likely become your boss in your future Metaverse career move.

What we can prophesise are these likely consequences to employers, recruitment, remote work and HR once the world of work goes ‘meta’.

1. Metaverse will bring employers talent without borders

In the Metaverse, the concept of ‘9-5 work’ will collapse completely if it hasn’t already. Time, space and place will become more malleable concepts. Work will happen even more asymmetrically than it does already.

EoR partners like Playroll are already helping expansion-ready companies hire new talent and grow global teams easily and compliantly across borders, Metaverse will open new, virtual channels for global talent search.

That said, the real world and its local-compliance regulations won’t just vanish. HR teams hiring metaverse will likely still be subject to the same HR challenges like global employee classification.

Furthermore, the real-world costs, compliance risk and legal maze of staying locally compliant in countries where talent physically resides will still apply. To avoid HR compliance fiascos, Employers building remote teams in the Metaverse will still do well with an Employer of Record partner.

2. Metaverse Will Bring ‘Always On’ Recruitment

Recruitment standards and HR practice in the Metaverse will reinvent what, when and where recruitment can be.

Employers will become more accessible, waiting to hear back about job applications will become a thing of the past and recruitment practice will be ‘always on’ and ‘always open’.

AI candidate screening will likely revolutionize talent-search workflows. From the candidate's perspective, searching for new roles may become almost instantaneous, more seamless and perhaps even more empathetic, involving experience.

3. Metaverse may extend employer brand

One of the most obvious applications of the Metaverse for employers seeking to enhance and innovate employer brands will be in creating immersive employer journeys and experiences.

Building remote work culture will take on new dimensions. Products, services, brand identity and employer experience will undergo transformations of possibility for those who want to go down the VR rabbit hole.

In the sense that distance and time will become less limiting, companies ready to hire, land and expand in new physical regions will harness Metaverse to elevate employer brand in these ways.

Metaverse Won’t Change Real-World Regulations and Compliance Risk. Those Things Will Still Give You a Headache

No matter how game-changing the Metaverse may be for employment, recruitment, HR talent search and work culture, real-world feet-on-the-ground facts will remain. Not every employer will want or need to ‘go meta’.

Those that do may encounter unforeseen challenges. Those that don’t will still thrive with old fashioned, physical-world expansion plans.

Ultimately, growing global teams and building remote and hybrid work culture will still be about navigating the challenges of local employment compliance.

Make Playroll your Employer of Record partner for a virtually risk-free global talent expansion strategy

For expansion-ready businesses hungry to cultivate remote-work culture but not quite ready to trade a keyboard and mouse for a VR headset, there’s always Playroll.

We’ve grown global teams as part of VAT IT Group for over 25 years, since when Mark Zuckerberg was playing Tetris on a Gameboy. For you, that means global talent expansion without setting up employer entities, without new offices and without the legal risk of compliance.

Through their free Playroll dashboard, HR teams, payroll pros and hiring managers can create and send viable, locally-compliant work contracts to new global hires in minutes.
If you’re old enough to have had a phone interview via rotary phone, you’ll remember the 80s vision of VR. Back then VR headsets existed but were so clumsy, expensive and plain awful, virtual reality remained the stuff of fantasy. Today, thanks to the Meta formerly known as Facebook, Matrix-level VR has truly arrived, bringing with it deep implications to the world of work.