Quintessential Careers Press:
Job Search 2.0: Advancing Your Career Through Online Social Media
Chapter 6: Integrating Multimedia Into Your Job-Search Communications
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Following on the heels of sites like Dandelife that enable users to document their life stories in words, photos, and video, multimedia sites and approaches have become part of the exploding social-media scene and are playing roles in the job search. Integrating multimedia into the job search -- a controversial trend -- is one to watch.
At the same time, some hiring decision-makers are sounding death knells for the paper resume. It is certainly true, as Sue Danborn notes on Electronic Recruiting Exchange, that the value of the resume has decreased in the time since technology enabled employers to "gather resumes off the Internet by the thousands." We think the resume will be around for a while, but new forms of resume are evolving to join it. The "video resume" is a much discussed topic, although there's little consensus on what a video resume is or should be.
Indeed, increasingly career experts have expressed doubts about the future of video resumes. Less than a quarter of employers that Robert Half International surveyed in 2008 said they would accept video resumes from candidates. Employers have cited the time it takes for hiring decision-makers to watch video resumes compared to the few seconds it takes to scan a resume, the employment-discrimination concerns that accompany seeing what the candidate looks like before the interview, and government requirements about keeping resume data on file; to comply, employers would need to download and store video resumes. And despite the booming popularity of video on the Web, some experts maintain that text is still king on the Internet, as outlined in this blog entry.
Still, video from the candidate perspective is not entirely dead. Employers are using video interviewing to cut costs. Another variation is an audio or video file in which the candidate responds to typical interview questions. Kevin Wheeler, president and founder of Global Learning Resources, Inc., recently quoted John Younger, president and founder of the San Francisco-based firm Accolo: "While I don't think videos designed to replace a complete resume will ever take off, short videos where a candidate answers one or two particular questions will become very popular and useful."
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