more on video resumes
For the record, Heather Hamilton agrees with me about the video resume: One Louder : The exploding video resume. Neener.
Video resumes will exacerbate, not relieve, the problems inherent to resumes in general. The reason text resumes are so universally awful is that people have no idea what to put in them. They get hung up on whether to center or left/right justify their contact information instead of worrying about how to succintly describe their accomplishments and skills. Sitting in front of a video camera is not going to magically make anyone better at presenting themselves- it just makes them take up more of my time to say nothing at all. Video is going to do for the resume what PowerPoint did for the presentation, which is to say, provide negligible benefit to the people who know how to use it properly, and be a poorly-used crutch that bores the audience to tears for people who don’t.
That’s not to say that video doesn’t have its uses in the hiring process- if someone is a particularly dynamic presenter/speaker/trainer/whatever, it makes perfect sense to have sample clips available online. I’d even watch that kind of thing voluntarily, provided that I have already decided that the candidate is interesting. And how would I have come to that decision? By reading a resume, meeting the person at an industry event, or any of those other ways people use to get the attention of a hiring manager. If a video is all I have of a candidate, I’m not going to watch it.
November 27th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
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