For years, practically since the advent of the affordable portable video camera back in the 1980s, I have heard two statements:
1) Resumes will become a thing of the past.
2) Video Resumes, up to a 2-3 minute presentation, are the wave of the future.
Not so fast.
I have been recruiting since 1980 and during that time I have probably scanned or read close to 500,000 resumes. Whenever I post a job on our corporate website, the posting is picked-up by Indeed.com and published for general consumption leading to quite a few resume responses. Or I will post a position to CareerBuilder and get way more resumes, especially unqualified ones, than I care to read. The demise of the resume has been greatly exaggerated and today the resume is a crucial part of the hiring process, showing no signs whatsoever of slowing down.
Resumes that are well written with exquisite formatting will always be in style. They tell the story of who the candidate is, what they have accomplished and what they hope to accomplish in the future for you. If the resume does its job, the hiring authority for a company will want to have an interview or a phone screen at a minimum with you to see if there is any point in continuing as a candidate for their position.
In theory, the video resume seems to be a positive vehicle to accelerate the hiring process because it gives the hiring manager an opportunity to assess the candidate’s style, speech and presence all in the privacy of their own office. The video resume reveals much about the potential candidate as it is like a three dimensional version of the written resume. But there is one major obstacle with the video resume that no one has been able to overcome: illegal discrimination.
In practice, when you send a hiring authority your video resume, they immediately know your gender and race, or at least your skin color at a minimum. What if the person viewing the video resume dislikes men, women, people of color, diversity in any form, disabled or handicapped people or even people who may meet all the criteria for performing the position, but just doesn’t “look right”? How would you feel is you knew that you could do the job but the hiring manager had a preference for blond-haired people over red heads and discriminated on such a non-essential basis? Most likely, if you ever found out – and that would be difficult to prove at best – you would be furious if not take legal action.
Human resource professionals have not found a way to overcome the blatant discrimination that exists whenever a hiring authority reviews a video resume. The hiring authority automatically sees the candidate and can immediately discriminate while trumping up a reason if need be. People can easily discriminate against the image projected on a video resume and for that reason, the presentation is flawed and hindered.
Joshua 1:8
