Posts Tagged ‘video’
“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.
Colleen Aylward, Founder of InterviewStudio.com, to Speak at Onrec Online Recruiting EXPO 2009 November, 3-4 in Chicago
(CHICAGO, Ill. – DATE) Colleen Aylward, Founder & CEO of InterviewStudio.com is presenting at the Onrec.com and Kennedy Information Online Recruitment Conference & Expo 2009, to be held at the Donald E Stephens Convention Center, in Chicago, on November 3 & 4, 2009. Onrec.com EXPO 2009 is widely regarded as the “must attend” online recruitment event of 2009.
http://www.onrec.com/conferences/031109/default.html
Onrec.com is the world’s leading information resource for Human Resource professionals and recruiters using the Internet to recruit. Onrec EXPO 2009 is the only global gathering of online recruiting leaders and game-changing technologies.
Colleen’s industry knowledge and overall unique approach to recruiting will provide a great opportunity to those who attend Onrec EXPO 2009, in which he will be among over 40 expert speakers in attendance.
Session Topic:
Applicant Videos. Are they a Risk or the Next Advancement in Effective Screening with the Capability to Limit Discrimination?
Session Description:
From the muddy playing field of the video controversy in today’s applicant screening market, there arises a glimmer of hope that technology has indeed afforded us another game-winning opportunity in accessing rich, necessary applicant data and yet limit the potential for “hidden” discrimination in the process.
The first onslaught of stand-alone candidate videos brought “boo”s from the stands in the recruiting world, with applicants at first, second, and third base all tagged out for poor quality, or irrelevance. Add to that the double play of discrimination fears regarding the visual appeal of the candidate, and not one video made it to home plate.
Enter the next phase of technology tools for intertwining the EEOC and OFCCP guidelines with the screening process. There really is a way to start merging all data about your potential players and viewing it in relevant order. There is a way to narrow down the candidate pool legally using video as it should be used by recruiters and hiring managers.
Don’t strike out with applicant videos just because you’re not sure how to play. Come join us for this lively interactive session to learn how they can be used correctly, legally, and within compliance standards.
Leave this session with the latest White Paper containing information about all the video product vendors on the market today and the 15 Best Practices Paper about the Use of Video in Applicant Screening.
Speaking for the second time at an Onrec conference on the use of Video in the Employment marketplace, Ms Aylward takes on the controversial discussion of legal liability on the part of the Employer, and outlines the latest “best practices” guidelines for the use of video for applicant screening.
“New methodologies and technologies are always met with skepticism, resistance, and even fear in the beginning because they represent change which can be disruptive,” says Aylward, author of the industry White Paper on this subject untitled Unmuddying the Waters of Video as an Employment Tool. “In the HR world, the hesitancy can also come from fear of discrimination litigation due to “too much data” about a candidate.”
“In fact,” says Aylward, “The proper use of new technologies such as Video and Multimedia in the candidate screening process can actually assist employers in avoiding potential discrimination in their hiring practices — and can offer job candidates who may be in protected classes a richer set of tools to use in providing a complete profile of themselves — rather than just the standard resume which could include a name, a neighborhood address, a member organization, graduation dates, or even a photo – all data which can lead to immediate discriminatory conclusions. Using best practices in incorporating these new tools into the corporate hiring process will not only help ensure compliance and fair recruiting, but will shorten the hiring timeline and reduce interviewing travel and accommodation expenses as well.”
Speaker Bio:
With a business degree from University of Washington, followed by 24 years of high tech sales and management experience in large and small companies, including NCSS, Dun & Bradstreet Computing, Comshare, Carlyle Systems, and GEAC, Colleen Aylward came to the Recruiting industry in 1990 on a soapbox of Change.
Drawing on twelve years “on the other side” in Tech Support, Sales, and Regional Management, she transitioned to high tech recruiting in 1990 in the Seattle area. She founded Devon James Associates, Inc., one of the country’s first RPOs, to answer the progressive demands of local software vendors seeking MORE/BETTER/NOW. Her small firm has compiled an impressive repeat-client list simply by word-of-mouth (Visio, SPRY/CompuServe, Amazon, Alias/WaveFront, Cranium, InfoSpace, Rhapsody Networks and others). High energy, funny and slightly irreverent, Colleen and her unique approach have been mentioned in publications such as Barron’s, Forbes, Fast Company, Washington CEO, Smart Money, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Puget Sound Business Journal, and others.
From her work in the recruiting industry, Colleen’s passion has come to focus on technology solutions to solve the angst of those hiring managers she deals with on a daily basis: How to save time and money on recruiting and HR processes without sacrificing quality hiring results.
Now, launching her 3rd small company, InterviewStudio.com, Colleen Aylward can be reached at Devon James Associates, Inc. at colleen@devonjames.com or at InterviewStudio.com at colleen@interviewstudio.com
About InterviewStudio
Launched in 2007, InterviewStudio offers a SaaS model portal for employers and recruiters to quickly view complete Candidate Showcases before bringing the candidate in for the first round of interviews. InterviewStudio is driving a new paradigm shift in the hiring and job-seeking marketplace, bringing the total view of a candidate to the very beginning of the screening process. Visit InterviewStudio at www.interviewstudio.com or contact us at 425-466-7887.
The Onrec.com Online Recruitment Conference & Expo 2009, will be hosted by both recruiting powerhouses Kennedy Information and Onrec – for more information visit:
Two Recruiting Conference Powerhouses Join Forces
For more information on The Onrec.com Online Recruitment Conference & Expo 2009, contact RD Whitney at rd@onrec.com or go to www.onrec.com/Expo2009
InterviewStudio
14150 NE 20th St, Suite F1-518 Bellevue, WA 98007
www.InterviewStudio.com
Phone – 425-466-7887
Fax – 425-378-1683
Info@interviewstudio.com
Contact: Kevin Scott, kevin@interviewstudio.com
Office: 425.466.7887
The New H.R. Technology for Candidate Screening
Imagine being able to browse through candidates like you can in InterviewStudio… watch the video below to view how easy it is to scan through the candidate’s resume, their endorsements, their video interview, their assessment test scores, their LinkedIn profile… all on one screen using one tool.
Imagine the time you could save by cutting out the phone screens and first interview rounds using a tool like InterviewStudio for your candidate screening.
Yes, it takes a few minutes to screen a candidate this way instead of just looking for keywords on a resume, but what a rich set of due diligence data you now have at your fingertips with which to make quality decisions!
And taking a few more minutes of a recruiter’s time is well worth the weeks’ or even months’ worth of time and money savings to the employer.
The ultimate tool in Candidate Screening . InterviewStudio.
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.
Videos for Interview Purposes
For several decades, employers have been utilizing video conferencing in order to communicate with their internal staff or clients without having to fly people around the country. This new phrase “interview videos” is simply a newly packaged application of video technology. No longer do we need to spend $1000/hour at Kinko’s or some corporate video conferencing facility in order to see another person through our computer screen. Most webcams come with simple video chatting capability downloaded in 10 minutes from the CD in the box. Every generation is using video now – talking to grandchildren, keeping tabs on parents or college students traveling in Europe, or pre-screening a potential dating partner before committing to a real meet.
These are all instances of “live” video or “real-time” video – coming to you as it happens.
There are several vendors in the employment market jumping into this product/service category, basically repackaging a video conferencing tool like Webex or copying the newer Skype tool: LiveHire, CareerCam, GreenJobInterview, to name a few. You can use these services over your computer to talk with a remote person and/or see them on your screen with the use of a webcam in realtime.
By now, most everyone in the employment marketplace has heard the phrase “interview videos” or “video interviews”. These are canned videos (or stored videos) that contain a job interview, wherein a candidate is usually answering questions they received earlier from an employer, and then the employer can go watch them anytime via online password. These videos are available to view (securely) at any time since they are stored on a server that is available 24 hours a day. A job seeker simply needs access to a computer with a webcam on it (or plugged into it). Usually the built-in microphone on any computer will suffice for audio quality, but many people plug in a stand-alone microphone to enhance the sound when they are recording their videos for their interview.
In some instances, the potential employer will send their preferred interview questions to candidates via email ahead of time, or they will post their questions on their employment website. In these cases, the job seeker simply uses his/her own computer/webcam to videotape themselves answering these questions, and then “uploads” their video clips to YouTube or to a place on the employers website, so the employer can watch it later. Job seekers have to know a bit about technology to do this all themselves.
There are other sites, like our own InterviewStudio.com site, which walk job seekers through this “videos for interview” process in an easy step-by-step tutorial. Candidates get to choose their own interview questions from a list of 20 that are appropriate for their job function. When each question is answered, that video clip gets uploaded automatically to our site where all clips are stored securely behind passwords. Job candidates who choose to do their video interviews this way are being proactive, and have a “marketing tool” to then email out to any employer or recruiter of their choice. In this case, the job seeker owns his/her own showcase including the video interview, and can choose who can view it. Candidates obtain a URL address for their InterviewStudio “showcase” from their account online and they can type this into an email they are sending or can even upload this URL into an applicant tracking system text field to be stored along with their other candidate information.
Videos for interview purposes are becoming more popular with employers, since it saves them several days or even weeks in the screening process. The key is to make sure the videos they are viewing are professional, and useful as a compliant screening tool—meaning that videos for interview purposes will soon have rules and governing guidelines for both job seekers and employers to conform to – whether the video interviews are live or canned for viewing later.
From Resume To Resume Video – In A Few Short Years !
As legend has it, Leonardo DaVinci created the first professional resume in 1482. For what purpose, I’m not sure, but it is likely he needed a real job, as did many unsung artists in history. Would that all historical greats had created a resume video for us to view!
Since then, the traditional resume hasn’t changed all that much, unfortunately:
Section 1: Name and Address
Section 2: Objective Statement
Section 3: Chronological Work History
Section 4: Education
The only significant addition in the last 20 years has been the introduction of KEYWORDS into the text of the resume, and that is only because computers are reading resumes now instead of people. A “Section 5” has been added in many online resumes that is simply a long string of words and phrases such as “C++, SQL, project management, PMP, program management….”.
With the advent of MySpace, Facebook, and Linkedin, the physical appearance of job candidates came back into play along with previously taboo data like age, lists of friends and hobbies, and various substance intake preferences.
And then it was a short stretch from photos to video. YouTube capitalized on this trend of ‘full disclose’ by the younger generations, and the first round of the YouTube Resume Video started to appear in 2006.
The Resume Video so far has no rules, no restrictions, and no governing standards board. They range from a simple talking head (a head and shoulders view of a candidate reading their resume out loud) to animated pleas for jobs and then more recently to professional productions that present many facets of a person’s work background, skill sets, and personality.
Early on, the human resources departments of many of the larger corporations balked at the viewing or use of any type of resume video out of fear of potential discrimination claims by those who were not selected based on something in their video. Employment attorneys counseled companies to “just say no” to the resume video in an effort to avoid even the slightest possibility of discrimination claims.
“‘Just don’t even deal with them,’ said Dennis Brown, an attorney in the San Jose, Calif., office of Littler Mendelson whose firm recently advised employers about the dangers of video résumés at a seminar.”
But in the 2007 Video Resume Survey by Vault.com, “89% of employers revealed that they would watch a video resume if it were submitted to them”.
So, it is 2009, and bloggers are proclaiming that perhaps the initial paranoia was premature, since there has not been one discrimination case yet due to a resume video. In addition, it appears as if companies may be saving money by not flying as many candidates in for interviews, and not having to put them up in hotels, or pay for cabs or parking. Then too, their interview teams are not wasting as much time in group interviews only to find out in the first 5 minutes that the candidate was not a corporate culture match at all.
Like it or not, the resume video is not going away. The good news is that they are morphing to include other pieces of due diligence – the electronic resume, links to annual reviews or portfolios, shortcuts to their social media profiles, reference checks and endorsements – in order to provide a cross section of candidate assets. In addition, the trend is away from the simple “resume video” and more towards “video interviews”, wherein the job seeker is not necessarily talking about his/her chronological history of jobs, but is answering behavioral and situational interview questions, much like those asked in a typical face-to-face interview.
As you can see in the History of the Resume chart, the pace of change has gone from centuries to months in the last few years. Technology integration has reached a point where multi-media is not just an entertaining YouTube video any more, but a true collection of multiple electronic data pieces all in one place at one time.
Just had to mention that, in a funny turn of events, YouTube videos are now teaching people how to write paper resumes. Technology marches on.
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.
Job Interview Videos
Traditional screening technology has created some obstacles for the Job Seeker that job interview videos just might relieve. Currently candidates with an electronic resume can shoot it off to an electronic job description with an electronic screening set of rules and take their chances that they included the right KEYWORDS.
Job Seekers also gamble that the human who is looking through the “screened” resumes will understand all the jobs on the resume and what that experience could mean to a new employer.
For the infrastructure employee, or those who will perform specific repeatable tasks, this is not a bad way to save time in candidate screening. But a search for anyone who can think outside the box, bring new and interesting solutions to old problems, create new revenue streams by discovering new channels, cut product development time by 50% by revamping the architecture, or structure inventive alliance partnerships to get around old commerce rules… this KEYWORD recognition thing just doesn’t cut the mustard.
Employers are still struggling to find and hire the right candidates… and have been doing so for the past 20+ years.
Let’s look at the real problems in the market. Employers are still struggling to find and hire the right candidates… and have been doing so for the past 20+ years. “No keyword searching tool has solved the iterative process that is inherent in a thorough due diligence process.” A partial answer to this problem that has huge value could be job interview videos.
Whereas Keyword searching provides a good “first pass” at a stack of 200 applicants by narrowing the pool according to “the 3 S’s”:
- Skills (which keyword skills are on the resume, e.g. C++, sales, project management)
- School (which college, degree, and date of graduation)
- Status (employed, unemployed, recently laid off, re-entering the workforce)
… job interview videos can provide tremendous value-add in “the 3 C’s” to a recruiter or hiring manager.
- Composure/Poise
- Communication Skills
- Corporate Culture Match
Granted, the traditional first in-person interview would provide these 3 C’s, but at what cost? Business moves too fast in today’s world to wait days to reach a candidate, and to coordinate the interview team’s schedules for that first meet — or even for those first video conference. And how many times has a candidate been brought in for a day’s worth of team interviews, only to find in the first 10 minutes of the day that the 3 C’s are lacking
There really is a 4th “C” on this list: Convenience.
There really is a 4th “C” on this list: Convenience. Schedules don’t always match up nicely in order to coordinate in-person interviews, or even Live interview videos. These stored “on-demand” job interview videos that can be viewed at any time along with the other due diligence (resume, endorsements, etc) can save weeks of time, particularly for executives who travel often.
The convenience afforded to all interview team members by offering stored job interview videos for screening at any time, day or night, (and repeated visits to the same job interview video) offers the freedom of screening at a time when the team member can focus and concentrate on all the factors that may affect a critical quality hire — especially for the executive job interview. Imagine being able to choose “finalist candidates” in a matter of 2 weeks instead of 3 months. And calculate the savings:
- Fewer airline tickets for candidates
- Fewer hotel rooms for interview travel
- Fewer workday hours spent on first interviews by productive team members
- Fewer hours spent on phone screens by recruiting staff
In the spirit of progressive technology solving difficult problems, job interview videos have lots going for them, provided they’re done correctly.
Stay tuned for the next blog installment on this subject…
Interviews on Video? Read Baron’s article: Match.com For Employers
Are interviews on video becoming more accepted? Apparently so. Even Barons magazine chose to mention them as long as a year ago. Article below:
Match.com for Employers?
Edited by ROBIN GOLDWYN BLUMENTHAL
BARONS – April 28, 2008
JOBLESS CLAIMS ARE STILL SHOWING SIGNS OF A LACKLUSTER economy, but there’s now an electronic way for people to put themselves in front of potential employers — the InterviewStudio.com.
The brainchild of Colleen Aylward, founder of Devon James, a Seattle recruiting firm that spent a year helping Amazon find employees, the software package lets job seekers showcase their talents on the site with their résumés, a video interview, recommendations and other helpful items for $150 a year.
Companies pay Aylward $1,200 to $5,000 a month to keep an InterviewStudio link on their Websites for hiring purposes, enabling them to more efficiently screen potential candidates, without hiring a high-priced executive recruiting firm or being constantly spammed by them.
“Management search savings could be in the tens of thousands of dollars,” says Aylward. Consider that an $85/hour internal recruiter might screen 15 candidates at two hours each, for approximately $2,500. Calculate a six-hour round of interviews in one day with six to eight highly paid employees, at, say, $134 an hour.
“That’s approximately $6,500 for each day that is wasted on a round of interviews with a candidate that isn’t the right fit,” says Aylward. She adds that generally at least two of these exercises in futility take place in a large organization each month. Add flight, hotel and cab expenses and, well, you get the picture. (The site has a return-on-investment calculator built into the employer page.)
So far, InterviewStudio is gaining fans. Recently, Gartner Group dubbed it as one of 2008’s four “Cool Vendors for Human Capital Management Software.”
– Leslie P. Norton
So, as Barons and Gartner both agree, there is a future for Interviews on Video done correctly, especially in this recent economy where saving time and money is paramount. “Cool Technology” aside, it’s even cooler to get greater return on every recruiting dollar spent.
10 Things We Hate About Video Resumes (as opposed to Video Interviews)
- Video Resumes (a simple video taped recap of resume highlights) are the current “hot new technology” in recruiting. But only for their novel high tech feel… not for the value they bring. Once this newness and ‘coolness’ wears off on Employers – and it already is – then we will see the NEXT generation of products on the market that will fix the shortcomings of the stand-alone video resume. Just as the first attempts at resume databases, search engines, and ATS systems needed to go through several iterations, so will this Video Screening Phenomenon.
he shortcomings of the current offerings include some mentioned by systematicHR and Raghav Singh, but the list is longer, and we might as well get some collaborative input on this now.
Here is a start:
1. A talking head that is simply regurgitating the text on a paper resume adds only one thing – the picture of what a candidate looks like. Granted, there is some value in viewing their language skills, but they could have been ‘coached’ by a video vendor during the session. So this leaves the very real paranoia within the HR community that video resumes are putting discrimination tools in the hands of hiring managers – and that video resumes are simply a clever way to put a face with a name, inviting all sorts of litigation.
6. IT Security & Firewalls may block videos. We all know how diligent IT Departments must be these days regarding the downloading and/or opening attachments. Even more so now with videos. Some of the problems with old video resumes:
7. Files recorded on a Mac often won’t play on a PC and vice versa
8. Employer’s installed version of software for viewing Rich Media Content on the web may not be compatible with all Videos.
9. There is a SIZE issue toVideo Resumes. They take up storage space, yes. The bigger issue is the intensive demand on servers when 20 recruiters bandwidth required to watch them, or for several hiring managers or recruiters to watch them at the same time.
10. Files are too big to be easily sent around as email attachments.
Please feel free to add your two cents worth on the downsides to Video Resumes listed above.