Launching in late June with little fanfare, CareerBuilder is the first major job board in the United States to offer video resumes. Now, not even two months later, there are more than 1,000 videos online.
“We see this as another facet of recruiting,” said Richard Castellini, vice president of Consumer Marketing for CareerBuilder. “The conversations that we’ve had [with recruiters] are that this is an additional information source.”
CareerBuilder considers the service a public beta launch; thus, it is studying how candidates and recruiters use video resumes before it promotes them later this fall. Castellini says the company is confident employers will come to embrace videos as a way to further narrow candidate pools.
“The principal resume will continue to be the first level of weeding out,” he says. But once the pool is narrowed to the top five or so, recruiters will watch the videos to decide who they want to interview.
How fast recruiters and employers will accept the video resume as a screening tool is anyone’s guess. Vault.com, which began accepting videos months ago, claims that 89% of the employers it surveyed would watch a video resume. The reason given by 52% of the surveyed employers was to “assess a candidate’s professional presentation and demeanor.” Even so, only 17% of the 309 employers in the Vault survey had actually viewed a resume. Consultant Gerry Crispin has also questioned their usefulness.
One hesitancy recruiters have is exposing themselves to claims of discrimination. Consultant and former PeopleClick executive Raghav Singh wrote in an ERE article in February, “It‘s not a reach to believe that a creative lawyer can make a case for discrimination.”
Castellini’s take is that “it’s not an issue,” though CareerBuilder has designed in safeguards against accidental viewing of the videos that might occur when a video launches automatically. Some companies may have a policy against videos. Or a recruiter may simply not want to take the time to watch one.
Still, video resumes are growing in popularity with job-seekers. Search YouTube.com for the keyword “video resume” and you’ll find page after page of personal employment videos. Some are quite good. Others rival that of Aleksey Vayner, the Yale student whose infamous video resume included a karate demonstration in pursuit of a job at investment bank UBS.
CareerBuilder’s video site offers tips on how to create a video resume and examples of good and bad resumes using actors. “We’re trying to tell people to put it in a fairly professional setting,” Castellini said, adding many of the videos “have been fairly well done.”
“I think it will become another integral part of the recruitment process,” he added.