Now, video resumes not far from you

To get a job one will soon have to dance and sing and get the whole act filmed. Well, you needn’t really do that as long as you can talk impressively about yourself and your professional achievements. Video resumes are soon going to become a reality, as Lisa Takeuchi Cullen says in an article in Time Magazine.

Online job boards such as Jobster, 62ndview, HireVue and Resumevideo will soon be launching career sites featuring video resumes. The article quotes Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster as saying, “I can see a day when video as part of the resume is the norm.”

The idea clicked when a Yale student, Aleksey Vayner, submitted his video resume to investment bank, UBS. Though UBS didn’t think much of it, the resume went on to become a YouTube classic. And soon, recruiters and job seekers woke up to the possibility of ‘marrying the video CV to the internet.’

Already YouTube has close to 1,590 entries listed under resume. Only a few can be called smart, colourful and effective. Take for example, University graduate Benjamin Hampton’s resume. He posted a five-and-half minute video. A PR firm was so impressed that they have already interviewed him.

But then, not everybody can be impressive or even know how to present themselves. The article refers to videos of a ‘blue-shirted manager with a knee jiggle and a boring spiel’ and a software engineer who gangsta raps in his CV. Obviously, these wouldn’t be considered.

Not many employers are trolling YouTube for candidates. Resumevideo sends online “postcards” of job candidates to a network of mostly not-for-profit employers.

HireVue sends webcams to job candidates, who use them to answer real-time interview questions. Employers can view the clips immediately online, saving time and money by eliminating the first round of in-person interviews.

Once the rest of the YouTube generation enters the workplace, “video resumes are going to be as ubiquitous as PDAs or iPods,” says Mark Oldman, a co-president of Vault.com.