Posts Tagged ‘job candidate’
“Total Candidate Profile™” – Not “Video Resumes”
The phrase “Video Resumes” is in vogue, but these talking head productions are different than “video interviews”. And whichever one you favor, they are really only one piece of a Total Candidate Profile™ which can contain most of the data out there on the web in one “showcase”.
Video is being used in Employment Applications in basically two categories:
1. Employer Branding Videos, wherein the employer company and its hiring managers are video taped evangelizing the company and/or the job and those videos are either placed on the company’s home page, or their career page (where their job listings appear) or are sent out in email campaigns or pushed out to YouTube and that YouTube link is used in email campaigns for hiring purposes.
2. Candidate Videos, which actually fall into two sub-categories:
a. Video Resumes which are canned, pre-taped videos of the job seeker basically speaking their resume… talking through the chronology of what they have done and why they are a good employee. Examples are InterviewClips and VideoResume. Neither of these are a Total Candidate Profile™ containing rich content data representing all aspects of a candidate’s asset value.
b. VIDEO INTERVIEWS which are either canned or live/interactive, but include one or more formal interview questions chosen by the employer, and answered on video tape (either via webcam or family video camera or by a professional videographer). One example is HireVue. Another is GreenJobInterview.
Video technology for the employment market is in its “first phase”, just as the written resume had a first phase and evolved to a digitized form. In the very near future, video will become just a part of a Total Candidate Profile™ that will be submitted for employment purposes rather than just a resume. These profiles will include readily available due diligence (data and media) about job candidates that can be grabbed from the web or input directly by the candidate themselves. For instance, InterviewStudio allows a job candidate to build a total online profile of himself that combines the traditional resume, his endorsements by former managers or co-workers, the results of a professional assessment test he has taken online, his LinkedIn or other social network links, his portfolio documents, and links to whatever Google or Yahoo or Zoominfo might present about him.
Gartner and other analysts call these new profiling software tools “mashups” since they mash together a lot of leading edge technology in one product or tool so that huge strides in time-and-dollar savings can be made with these combinations.
We call this a Total Candidate Profile™ and we believe they will become the standard in hiring and recruiting since they provide the employer or recruiting agency much more due diligence about a job candidate upfront, without the long drawn out iterative process that usually takes up to 90 days to seek this information online or schedule the job seeker to provide. In fact, a professional comprehensive profile can save recruiting departments from 2 to 6 weeks in the hiring process since they actually change the process that needs to happen: you may no longer need a phone screen or even a first face-to-face interview by a recruiter.
Video CVs are Just the Forerunner of Things to Come
Video Resumes or “video CVs” tend to be short video clips of a job seeker speaking his/her background and skills — we call them “outloud resumes” — and they are really just a front-runner to complete platforms such as InterviewStudio. There is little value for a stand-alone video resume (or video CV) since, on its own, it hasn’t been proven to SAVE TIME AND MONEY in the hiring process AND it brings with it the paranoia of discrimination litigation.
However, there is hope. Like all cycles in new “progressive” technology, there already have been several iterations of this type of candidate presentation tool, and the industry is moving toward a hybrid model of resume-plus-video interview-plus-references-plus-social network all in one digital representation of a job candidate.
Here is what is Good and Useful about tools in the future that will include Video Interviews with other pieces of candidate due diligence:
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- Videos are only one piece of the total candidate due diligence in these new combination products, so the emphasis on the visual is downplayed a bit.
- Video Interviews are quite easy to produce now and too widespread in marketing and media to ignore.
- The younger generations are growing up on video, so the video CV is a logical extension for them.
- The technology is easy to use, and the equipment is inexpensive.
- It saves time to look at a 2-minute video interview rather than do a 20-minute phone screen
- It saves time to look at a 5-minute all-inclusive candidate presentation rather than spend hours scheduling a first interview round to find out the fit.
- It saves money to watch a 20-minute Interview rather than fly a candidate in and put him/her up in a hotel.
- Having access to on-demand all-inclusive showcases of candidates allows hiring managers to choose when to interview, instead of tying them down to disruptive schedules during the work day.
- More and more Employers are creating branding videos of their own on their own Career Pages to attract Candidates. It just follows that soon Employers will be accepting branding videos from candidates as well.
- The industry needs some collaborative rules or accepted behaviors for Video Interviews. This can be easily accomplished by blogs such as this.
- Technically, most corporations are now pretty savvy in regards to rich media viewing software, and Flash is an accepted program that is widely installed. Flash is cross-platform, meaning if it works on one computer, it will work on any other with Flash installed. Flash is small and lightweight, but carries a robust video control platform. You never have to leave your webpage to view the video. Flash can be embedded right into the page. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=344
- As technology marches on, rich media viewing will become cleaner and quicker.
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The bottom line is that currently, yes, there are downsides to the tools out there labeled “Video Resumes” (or Video CVs), as discussed in a previous blog post. However, the Good News is that vendors such as InterviewStudio have now worked through the technology challenges to aggregate all of these disparate (but important) pieces into a single robust, time-saving information platform for screening, due diligence and selection.
