The Drawbacks of a Video Resume

The buzz when looking for a job in the past few years has been around video resumes. Are they effective? Is this required by all job seekers? Although we can’t speak for all employers, we can provide you with our experience having screened and hired for many reputable companies. Personally we aren’t ready to endorse this new trend for job seekers. Anytime you stray from traditional resumes, it can either be advantageous or backfire. Here are some of our thoughts about video resumes:

Time Consuming: Time is probably the biggest drawback to video resumes. When screening traditional resumes most recruiters spend an average of 30 seconds per resume. You can imagine how time consuming this can already be when dealing with hundreds of submissions. Just the thought of going through the same process of inserting a cd or clicking a link to watch a video resume is already annoying. Employers will lose their patience and focus very quickly.

Professionalism: Although many job seekers find professional video resume companies to create their resume; this isn’t the case for most. In many cases watching a video resume is like watching a video on youtube. 

Artificial & Rehearsed: Why trust a video plug-in that has been rehearsed and re-recorded a thousand times. Let’s face it; most people are not comfortable in front of the camera so why create something that isn’t natural. Most employers will be distracted by the video and lose all focus on the auditory value; meaning you won’t be taken seriously.

Discrimination: Anytime an employer makes a hiring decision based on a picture or video, employers can face major discrimination ramifications. So rather then facing the possibility, employers will avoid video resumes at all cost. Video resumes encourage discrimination by showing an applicants age, sex, race, disability etc.

Broadband/High speed: Don’t assume all employers have broadband equipped computers or are tech-savvy.  Candidates may be eliminated before the employer has the opportunity to even open the video resume.

Lack Guidelines: Since video resumes are quite new, they do not follow any guidelines or specific layout which makes them hard to evaluate. With traditional resumes, employers have the ability to create one generic checklist to evaluate all resumes since they follow a similar format (e.g. Employment, Education, Training, Volunteer Work, Technical skills etc.).

Lack Written Communication: Employers often use the traditional resume to evaluate a candidate’s written communication skills prior to evaluating oral skills in the job interview. This is an important evaluation criterion that many employers are not willing to forgo in their recruitment process.

Keep in mind, video resumes should not be viewed as a replacement for traditional electronic resumes; instead as a compliment. A professional video resume can provide beneficial for job seekers in various fields where physical appearance is priority (e.g. Modelling). At the current time there are many drawbacks to the video resume and until there are significant improvements, the traditional paper is the most widely accepted and best choice.

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Information provided by, HRinmotion.
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