Magic Pot of Jobs

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.

Please tell me that I’m not the only person who understands that the “video resume” isn’t going to take off anytime soon. There are several important reasons for this:

1. Most people read faster than people can talk. So while it might take me a minute to give your two page resume a good once-over, it will take me at least 5-10 to listen to you drone on about your qualifications. (This is also why I don’t listen to podcasts or watch video blogs.)

2. You know how most people aren’t that great at public speaking? Being good in front of the camera is even harder. The idea of having to sit through even 10 video resumes to fill a job fills me with enough dread to give up the idea of being a recruiter if they ever become that commonplace.

3. Um, hi, discrimination laws? Companies aren’t allowed to ask for photographs of applicants (except in the performing arts), and conscientious HR departments are really careful about avoiding anything that could be perceived as discriminatory. I think a lot of those HR departments don’t want to see what you look like until you’ve walked in the door for your interview. Video resumes represent a lot of hassle that HR people don’t want to deal with.

For all its shortcomings and faults, there’s a reason we’ve had the paper resume for as long as we have. It’s fast, it’s generally not filled with a bunch of dorky “ums” and “ahs”, and it’s hard to discriminate against text on a page.

One of the things that surprised me most when I first started reading recruiting blogs (which was only shortly after I got into recruiting) was the vehemence with which my fellow bloggers bashed the functional resume. Being but a recruiting noob myself, I was still blinded by my college career center’s advice that it was a perfectly valid format, ideal for showing skills in a way that makes the most out of limited experience.

But in another few months, I realized, the functional resume DOES suck. I’ve only got one talent with a decent, workable functional resume, but he’s a technical freelancer and his resume doesn’t require tons of context. Every other functional resume I’ve ever seen leaves me feeling like I really don’t have any idea what the candidate has spent their career doing.

Even so, the functional format does seem better suited than the chronological format to the task of showing transferrable skills, especially for career changers or people who are trying to turn a scattered series of jobs into a coherent professional progression. So what can be done to fix the problem?

My colleagues and I put our heads together and found what we believe to be an excellent way to combine the very legitimate goal of the functional resume with the much more high-context and readable chronological format. I’m sure we’re not the first ones to come up with it, but we’ve never seen any of our candidates use this method, so it’s clearly time to share it with you.

Start with a chronological resume. Under your most recent jobs, write 1-2 unbulleted sentences to summarize what your job was. Then take all your bullets and divide them into functional areas like “business development” or “account management” or whatever is relevant. If you’re changing careers, make sure these functional areas are relevant to the job you want. The point here is to make abundantly clear to any hiring manager or overworked HR generalist how your existing experience relates to the new career you want.

For example, from my own resume:

[Recruiter] ~ [MISF] ~ Washington, DC ~ January 2005-present
In dual role as both recruiter and account manager, match qualified IT and Interactive Media professionals with client job openings for temporary and permanent placement at a variety of agency, association, and commercial clients in Greater DC.

• Needs analysis: Conduct fact-finding interviews with both talent and clients to evaluate goals, set expectations, and make recommendations regarding employment and staffing needs.
• Client service: Manage full lifecycle recruiting, candidate submission, interview scheduling, and rate/salary negotiation process for an average of 18 open orders concurrently.
• Business development: Negotiate fee agreements for recruiting and placement services. Build client relationships, promoting [MISF] as staffing agency of choice for recruiting solutions. Represent [MISF] at career fairs, networking events, and curriculum advisory boards.
• Professional development: Pursue expertise in employment law as relates to the staffing industry. Attain internal [MISF] certification for entire period of eligibility in addition to the Certified Staffing Professional designation.

You can see that this arrangement of my experience at the MISF would position me for an account management position in a variety of industries, not just staffing. At the same time, you have a good sense of what I was actually doing, and I have connected the dots for you on how it would relate to other types of work. It also demonstrates through the “Professional Development” item, that I am someone who is committed to learning as much as possible about my chosen field- a critical point if I were looking to make a change.

There’s more to say about this format, but for now, just go try it out on your own resume and see what you think.

Would you hire this person to write your resume?

I sure hope not…