A virtual careers fair doesnt sound all that futuristic any more.

Virtual worlds like Second Life – which has almost 9m registered users - are essentially an extension of chatrooms, but provide a content-rich environment, immersing the user in a three-dimensional interactive world and enabling recruiters to interact far more holistically with candidates.

Second Life is one of many virtual world platforms, but the key to success is running and promoting the session as you would a live event, to a targeted audience: “Just as you wouldn’t turn up in a town square and start targeting passers-by to come and work for you, it is important that your ‘event’ is in the right space and aimed at and promoted to your target audience.”

James Bowmer, country manager of Kelly Services, says: “Second Life provides us a platform to communicate globally with customers and job seekers using interactive relationships.”

Matthew Whitbourne, senior inventor at IBM, which has been using virtual worlds in recruitment for 18 months, agrees, claiming that virtual worlds “allow IBM to engage with candidates and talk about careers in a unique and powerful way”.

IBM uses virtual worlds as an extension of its existing recruitment efforts, hosting pre-scheduled events on Second Life and inviting specified groups of graduates to meet hiring managers, experts and senior business figures in this space, and talk about their careers.

The use of virtual worlds as a recruitment tool has been much hyped of late – TMP hosted the UK’s first ever ‘virtual world’ careers fair last year; Kelly Services launched its own island in Second Life; and GCHQ, the government intelligence organisation, has been advertising in online gaming to tempt web-savvy graduates to become spies.

But how is it possible and what does it mean to use virtual worlds as a recruitment tool? Is this wave of technology really going to dwarf social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace? Is it merely an over-hyped media gimmick or the next evolution of the web?

“The key benefit to going virtual is that employers can afford to encourage their managers to spend time networking with potential candidates.”

To the less technologically savvy, the idea that virtual worlds could be used as a recruitment platform may seem a strange and surreal proposition restricted to the realm of the computer geek, but employers – including RBS, Yell, KPMG and IBM – are discovering that it can be a highly effective medium to interact with candidates.