Would you create and distribute a video résumé or hire someone who sent you one?
Video résumés can be more revealing than a job seeker intends. That hasn’t stopped a few thousand mostly young job candidates from posting them on You Tube or e-mailing them to recruiters and employers. Most of the early video résumés have been criticized by corporations and recruiters who not only dislike the uneven content and quality but concede that they are ill-prepared to work with them.
You can’t screen a video résumé using today’s candidate tracking software.
Worse, hiring managers are concerned that seeing a candidate’s photo or video may bias their judgment and possibly result in more discrimination.
Still, Alexsey Vayner exceeded his wildest expectations: his infamous “Impossible is Nothing” video résumé has received nearly a half million streams on You Tube. Much more typical is this sub-minute effort by Chrissy Harvey. One impatient wag commented back to her: “Great, tell me how many offers you got so far?”
Where do you stand on video résumés? Is it yet another disruptive technology or a set back for diversity and fair employment practices? If you know of a good video résumé, send us a link.
A video resume does not integrate into present hiring processes especially at the top of the candidate selection funnel. Also, most candidates do not do well in front of a camera, and most of the video is a rehash of what’s already on their resume. The reviewer’s inherent bias starts immediately when the video begins.
The interest in video resumes does suggest that candidates are looking for a better way to represent themselves. Video interviews on the other hand can be useful for candidates for are short-listed and not geographically close to the interview site.
The “next gen” resume must be in MS Word in order to seamlessly integrate into all past, present, and future hiring processes. What additional content to include in the “next gen” resume is not difficult to determine. You just have to review what a number of employers are asking for at their employment portals. For example, short-listed candidates are invited to complete a cognitive and/or skill assessment.
The big question is “next gen” resume delivery. If a candidate completes an assessment of some type, and includes that in their resume, the data would remain inherently untrustworthy since the candidate can simply edit / alter the MS Word document in any way they’d like. This is the primary reason why employers administer the assessments. It’s the only way for them to insure that the results are not tampered with.
The potential solution is to apply a digital signature to the “next gen” resume in MS Word. Once the digital signature is applied, the “next gen” resume can NOT be edited or altered without detection. No special hardware or software is necessary to open and read the “next gen” resume. Scientifically based cognitive and/or skill assessment data could be inserted, and the prospective employer could rely on the fact that the scientific data was not edited or altered.
A sample “next gen” resume with a digital signature issued by VeriSign can be picked up and reviewed at http://www.resumefit.com.
Video Resumes are definitely a novelty and Tom nailed it right on the head by saying that quality is completely variable. For video to be successful in a hiring process there needs to be company control and structure behind it so that 1) it does fit in a hiring system and workflow and 2) candidates have some sort of standardization across the board in terms of what they are responding to and addressing.
As a side note, Monster and Careerbuilder have about 70 million+ resumes between them, YouTube has probably at least 10-20m different videos and there are only ~5,000 video resumes, sure there is space for penetration but as always the novelty of it all only works for a few.
[...] Video résumés may seem like the next big thing to hit the job world but many hiring decision makers such as HR chiefs, recruiters and executives would rather hit the eject button than view another one. [...]
[...] He explores a wide range of job search issues, including the trendy question about video resumes. Like me, Graham’s not sold on the value of putting your skills and accomplishments on video instead of on paper. He cites three main problems including inconsistent content; the employer’s inability to search or organize video; and possibly subjecting yourself to a recruiter’s biases that may work against you. [...]