Video resumes - yes or no?

In today’s competitive job market, both recruitment consultants and employers are inundated by resumes in their inboxes. One creative way to stand out from the crowd is to send a video resume to your prospective employer. But the question is: Do they work?

Typically, most of the CVs that recruitment consultancies receive come in the form of PDF files or word documents sent via email.  Physical copies are no longer encouraged as we need to able to log them onto our sophisticated shared, global database.

Know which industry it’s for

A video resume would probably work for job seekers within the creative and media industries, amongst the younger and more tech-savvy talent pool. However, video resumes are typically quite rare for professionals at the mid to senior level – more so in the accounting and finance industry, which tends to be less “creative” and more focused on professionals bearing the right skill sets and experience more than their video-editing abilities.

Technical barriers

Firewalls and large file sizes could pose as potential barriers for your video resume to land in the inbox of your prospective employer, as compared to a smaller Word document or pdf file.

A video resume would probably work for job seekers within the creative and media industries, amongst the younger and more tech-savvy talent pool.

Nothing beats the human touch

Video resumes hat are sent unsolicited to employers and recruitment consultancies may have higher chances of ending up in the spam folder. With a text format, it is easier for your prospective employer to do a quick eyeball scan for keywords, instead of wasting time on a video.

For the hiring manager, video resumes take up valuable process time for viewing, and cannot be compared on an apples-to-apples basis with other candidates for a job.

The key is to save time in the hiring process by utilising tools that offer quicker and more in-depth assessments of a potential hire, and a video format may be less attractive in that aspect.