One of a whole list of possibilities I’ve considered over the years in my quest for what the perfect storytelling resume would look like has been video resumes, which I wrote about as recently as the Ink Foundry internship series that started here. I’ve long been aware of issues with video resumes, but my colleague Barbara Safani does a great job of laying out why they’re probably a bad idea in her article No One Wants to See Your Video Resume … Really!.
Barb presents the opinions of hiring decision-makers as well as some pretty
laughable video resumes.
As I stated in the headline of this entry, video resumes lend themselves to storytelling.
Here’s a summary from Barb’s entry of hiring-decision-maker issues with video resumes:
- They are too time-consuming to view given that text-based resumes are eyeballed for just a few seconds.
- It’s impossible to quickly discern the job-seeker’s accomplishments on a video resume.
- It takes a great deal of space to store them on a computer, and employers must save them for legal purposes.
- Job-seekers probably aren’t going to create a video tailored to each specific job opening, so the video resume they use is likely to be too generic and not targeted to the job applied for.
- Video resumes expose the job-seeker to discrimination based on age, ethnicity, and other factors communicated in a visual medium. Hiring decision-makers are at the same time exposed to litigation if the job-seeker should claim discrimination after being rejected based on the video resume.
As Barb points out, video does have its place in job search, such as using a short clip of yourself as a feature in a Web portfolio or blog, which you can link to from your various social-media profiles.