Tales From the Digital Side

If I had a nickel for every article, blog post, and question I’ve received in the last month or so about video resumes, I might be getting rich. There is so much buzz about this topic, and I’m actually surprised that the concept has gotten as far as it has.

First, I’ll admit that I think the concept of video resumes is pretty cool. If I hadn’t worked in the recruitment space for the last 9 years, I’d probably be pretty enthusiastic. But unless that guy from Heroes shows up to erase my memory before I finish this post, I think I’m going to have to say that I think the concept won’t ever catch on.

And here’s why (I’m not even going to touch the obvious EOE implications):

• Resumes being boring is not a real recruitment challenge. Being able to process more resume in less time is. Being able to identify qualified candidates sooner is. Finding more qualified candidates is. You get the point.
• Resume Review isn’t ever going to be exciting. Sure, it would be great if the process of reviewing resumes was as entertaining as watching 24 (if it helped you to lose weight, whiten your teeth, and lower your cholesterol all at the same time that would be great too). But it’s not and it’s really not meant to be.
• Candidates still don’t create good text-based resumes. If candidates can’t master that, how are they going to master video?
• ATS systems still can’t index text-based resumes well enough for most recruiters. Video resume black hole seems like an eventuality.
• I don’t know about you, but I can review a resume in less than 30 seconds. I’ll bet that is slow by professional recruiting standards. No video resume is ever going to get to the point in less than 30 seconds. Now imagine if you had to cut your recruiting team’s efficiency by 100%, 200%, 1000% so they could review video resumes. Where is the ROI?
• I’m happily employed, that makes me a passive candidate. Are you interested in seeing my video resume? Hmm. Ok – I’ll send it to you in 2012 when I have some time to put it together.
• Some might say you get to really see more of the candidate in video. But what you don’t see is how many takes it takes to get it perfect. Or maybe that they had it professionally produced and edited. This, of course, does open a lot of doors for the career counseling field.
• How are you going to keep video resume submissions off of YouTube? Obviously with this format, there are going to be some hilarious videos. Someone is going to post them to YouTube. Is your company going to be responsible for breaking promises to keep candidate information confidential? How will that affect your employer brand?

I could go on… but I think that is enough for now. So, there are entertainment fields where video resumes seem like a pretty decent solution. But for the majority of occupations, it seems like the recruitment industry has bigger “fish to fry” than making resumes more entertaining.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Emerging Technology, Interactive Recruitment, recruiting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.