Posts Tagged ‘keyword section’
How Video Resumes Came to Be
How Video Resumes Came to Be
Video resumes were the first attempt by job seekers to break out of the keyword trap and get around the computer screening programs. So how did the candidate screening market get to this frustration point for the job seeker, AND for the recruiter?
LIKE IT OR NOT, TIME MARCHES ON… Technology marches on… Tools get more progressive and disruption happens. Change happens. For about 50 years, the paper resume has ruled within corporations seeking new employees. People are used to it… People are comfortable with it. We were taught to write resumes in black ink on white paper and mail them out using stamps.
And then resumes became “soft-copy” (Yes there was a time when that was not a real word). The online resume became accessible instantly to several viewers at a time, and storable and retrievable.
And then came text search capability and KEYWORDS along with that. So today the comfort zone is not paper resumes anymore. It is soft-copy keyword-searchable resumes.
Today, the industry has deemed this as standard, and many vendor products have been developed to help parse, and poke, and rank and rate these KEYWORDS and their relevance to matching KEYWORDS in job descriptions, for instance.
RECRUITER FRUSTRATION
And, as most every system can be “gamed”, job seekers can now populate the KEYWORD section in their resume to match a job description and submit it with a keystroke, whether or not they are qualified. It is then incumbent upon the Recruiter to read through that mass of electronically “qualified” resumes to identify the truly qualified.
So Recruiters don’t have much time on their hands to really read a resume thoroughly –
- too much volume
- too many resumes look the same, populated with keywords from the online job description
- not enough time to do a thorough job — hiring managers need to hire NOW
CANDIDATE FRUSTRATION
Job Candidates were initially impressed when the Employer sent them immediate feedback after applying for a job. “Finally”, they thought. “This company cares.” Thoughtful “no thank-you” letters arrived minutes after an online resume submission. But this again was simply a production letter generated by the company’s ATS (Applicant Tracking System) and sent to all candidates who did not populate their resume with the correct keywords.
Enter VIDEO RESUMES
What does anyone do when they want attention? Yell louder.
The Video Resume is a louder yell: “HEY! Look at me!” “See how I talk – I’m 3-dimensional.”
As a headhunter, I talk to dozens of executives each week whose only objective is to “get in front of the hiring manager”. They don’t want tips about the newest keywords to use. Job seekers are tired of playing the keyword game, knowing full well that every other candidate for the same job is using the same keywords. And their patience is wearing thin with 22-year old internal corporate “recruiters” who call them up to ask simple questions – the answers to which are clearly on their resume. And lastly, job seekers have figured out the “mass email” tools that come with every ATS, and realize that no one actually reads their resume enough to grasp their total value as a candidate.
The first ever YouTube video was put up in April 23, 2005 by some guy at the zoo talking about elephants. And that was all it took. Now, every minute, twenty hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
So, naturally, video would be the new channel to use to get noticed. And candidates looking for jobs are eager to find ways to stand out from the mass of keyword-laden resumes, and to virtually “get in front of the hiring manager”. Armed with a PC or a Mac, and a $50 webcam, a job seeker can easily create a video as simple as a “talking head” – reading their resume in front of a camera.
Granted, there are issues galore with “video resumes”, many covered in our previous blog, but every new idea starts out a little rocky.
In time (and in the not so distant future), Video Resumes, as all other new products, will enter the professional realm and become more relevant to specific jobs, more polished as a tool, and have more industry-developed rules around them.
The first step is to change Video Resumes into Video Interviews. Stay tuned for more on that.
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