Thanks to WaggEd's Steve Fogarty for pointing me to PR Week's recent virtual career fair. There's a good writeup of the PR Week event (yes, they are good at getting the word out to other publications) here for anyone that's interested:
http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070402/FREE/70330018&SearchID=73276850279146
Also a novel approach. Provide content that the audience is interested in, screen people for qualifications before they enter your virtual "booth," and engage and personally interact with people once they're in there with virtual chat. In addition, anonynimity provided a safe environment for people - just imagine how uncomfortable seeing one of your coworkers there would be! - while funneling relevant candidates to recruiters and hiring managers by skill and industry.
The event was hosted by a company called Unisfair, which appears to have some very cool virtual-world type of technology similar in many ways to Second Life - not sure what the economics are on an event like this, but at the very least there's an opportunity for job boards, recruitment advertising agencies and niche publications to pool several employers together at one of these events. Absolutely worth checking out!
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