The Future of the Video Resume
Posted by Rick Deare on September 2, 2008
What place will video resumes play in job seeking, recruiting, selection and hiring?
A year or two ago, it seemed that usage of video resumes would catch on quickly.
But video resumes aren’t all the rage in the employment community.
Why?
Because the practicality, value and appropriate usage of video resumes is generally in question.
There are those that believe video resumes are Here to Stay. Some see the potential but are quick to point out that video resumes are Not the Next Big Thing (Yet). Others give reasons Why Video Resumes Won’t Become Mainstream. There are even those that see the use of video resumes as downright Preposterous. There are some strong Opinions and Rants, but so far, it isn’t easy to determine a single prevailing opinion across the recruitosphere. The vigorous debate over the future of the video resume continues.
CareerBuilder recognized potential in job seeker generated video resumes and incorporated an upload/view capability in order to test the viability. According to this article by John Zappe on ERE, CareerBuilder found that usage of the video resume just wasn’t there and ended the test run.
With a major job board dropping its video resume functionality, the future of video resumes might seem to be in trouble. But a closer look suggests that overall usage of the video resume by job seekers, recruiters and hiring managers is likely to increase steadily, if not rapidly. According to a recent survey by Vault.com, 69% of “employees” believe that video resumes will be a common addition to future applications and 89% of “employers” said they are open to viewing video resumes.
It’s likely to be at least a few years before many recruiters and human resources managers overcome their reluctance and embrace the widespread usage of video resumes. There are still significant legal, HR, system bandwidth, time consumption and recruiter/hiring manager productivity issues.
Video resume producers like Savvy Paper promote the value of video resumes and attempt to address some of the issues.
Ultimately, job seekers will drive video resume usage. Candidate generated video resumes posted to a job board like Career Builder may not be quite ready for prime time, but the bold and confident job seekers in our media/technology savvy culture will likely find a way to one-up the static Word doc resume. Smart candidates looking for an edge will find the most effective ways to market themselves to compete for jobs they want. Web deployed video is arguably the strongest medium for gaining a distinctive personal branding edge and getting the attention of prospective employers. Usage is likely to increase as the competitive advantages are more broadly realized.
That doesn’t necessarily mean job seekers will immediately post their video resume to a job board when they begin a job search. They’re far more likely to initially post or link their video resume to YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, a personal blog, et al.
While a video resume has the potential to help win an interview, there are some very apparent dangers to be considered by job seekers venturing to create their own.
A good one can create an advantage:
A bad one could be a career ender:
Right, wrong, good, bad, useful, useless… there will be a lot of video resumes posted out there by job seekers.
Who’ll be clicking on them?
Al Kerran said
I’m personally somewhat neutral to the idea of video resumes — I think if you can do a good one and the hiring manager is receptive, fine. But I can’t see them catching on like wildfire just yet. Why? The primary reason is that a video resume can’t be “scanned” or “searched” for key terms like “Harvard University” or “google” or “Proficiency in Adobe Photoshop”. Until it can, videos will forever be addenda to text in the resume world.
There are other reasons though. I think it gives an unfair advantage to candidates who happen to have editing skills. Pretty much anyone can make a pretty resume using microsoft templates — a “pretty” video takes a bit more skill. And I don’t care who you are — the most open and objective hiring manager or a topnotch talent hound from a recruiting market like Dayak — you’re going to be swayed by good production values. Whether or not they make a candidate truly more qualified for the job is another story.