Recruiter News Line

When MTV co-opted Apollo mission footage and made it appear as though astronauts were planting a flag for Music Television on the moon – some predicted that video would take over the world, and the printed word would die.

Thankfully, that hasn’t happened – especially since I make my living as a writer. But, what certainly has happened is that several generations have grown up having to be as equally literate with video as they are with reading and writing.

It’s just a natural progression that this new generation is starting to embrace the idea of a video résumé – a video produced and posted on an internet video site that can be viewed by a prospective employer.

Job seekers are attaching these videos, typically as a link in an e-mail, with the hopes that employers will see the personality and enthusiasm for a job that can be lost in a written résumé. Some applicants believe that their oral communications skills are better than written, and that he will be better able to sell himself with a video.

The upside is that these benefit you too when you’re looking at the initial résumé package. You will be able to save the time of an interview if you don’t think the candidate presented himself well, or you can skip right to a follow up interview if you were really impressed.

There is a downside to a video résumé that many legal experts are warning employers and recruiters about – the possibility of a lawsuit. Most of the factors left off of a paper résumé to prevent discrimination, i.e. gender, race, weight and age, are front and center in a video. Even if you don’t discriminate against the candidate for any of those reasons, it’s easier to prove you don’t if you lack that knowledge entirely. You’ll want to carefully consider if the advantages of a video résumé outweigh the possibility of a discrimination suit – although none have been brought to court as of this writing.

If you do decide to click on that link and take a look, judge the video the same you would any résumé or interview. How much effort was put into the video? Is the applicant just reading his cover letter? How professionally is he dressed? How well does he communicate ideas?

In the same vein, don’t get caught up by a particularly flashy video or one that has lots of effects and editing. Is he trying to hide something behind all of that flash? How much of his personality is actually coming through?

You may also want to use the video at the screening stage rather than the initial review process. A good eye can search through the initial stack of résumés spending 30 seconds on each one. A video can be much longer than that, and you can potentially spend four times as long searching through that initial pool of applicants. Saving the video for the screening stage can then save you time by possibly eliminating the phone screening step so you can go ahead and invite the applicant in for an interview.

At this stage, a video résumé should only be viewed as, and accepted as, a supplement to the applicant’s formal cover letter and résumé. Perhaps one day our business will go completely video – but, for now you can feel confident to keep your feet planted in the old school and dip your toes into the new media waters.

In case you haven’t heard, the sky may be falling. Due to some serious losses across the stock market, and even heavier losses expected after a fire sale in the foreign markets, a lot of economic pundits are scrambling around the farmhouse like Chicken Little predicting the arrival of another recession.

I’m not here to predict whether America will fall into an officially named economic slump or not. There are far better qualified men than me to help you with that. No, I’m going to clue you in on the fact that for recruiters, business is about to pick up.

Like peanut butter goes with chocolate, job hunts go with fears of recessions. It doesn’t matter if the recession actually materializes, just the threat of it being the lead story on every nightly news cast is enough to make people start polishing up their résumés and steadying themselves for the worst – being laid off.

You’ll soon be contacted by the first wave of nervous employees hoping to shore up their futures with a new job. At the very least they want a job with less potential for being laid-off than the one they have now.

Which means it’s time to really start reaching out to the companies on your client list and start seeing what jobs will be open for this sudden influx of eager candidates. The good news is that you should see a higher percentage of highly qualified candidates, each with a high degree of interest in changing jobs. Now, all you have to do is find the jobs for them.

I’ve been doing some informal internet research on job applicants and their experiences with recruiters and HR departments. The complaints were varied and many, but one common theme just kept having its drum beat; “I never got a call back,” “I never got a call back,” and just to spice things up, “I never got a call back.”

I’m well aware that it’s impractical to call back each and every applicant as they may number in the thousands. You’d spend all of your time on the phone with them and have no time to prepare your candidate you’ve chosen for the client. But, there’s an important underlying theme to these complaints.

In a basic economic model, the client is the customer and the applicants are the product. Since the money comes from the client, we tend to favor them with our best customer service skills. Giving a high level of service to the applicants (product), well, only so far as the few chosen ones we are putting up for the job. The rest are too often collateral damage.

But, should they be?

There’s a rule in business that for every good experience a customer has they will tell one person, but for every bad experience they will tell seven. If that’s true, all of the applicants whom entrust us with their résumé who we don’t call back are telling seven friends to not trust recruiters. That’s a problem, especially if we get a job order that matches that person’s skills, but they no longer want to deal with us.

We shouldn’t ignore these people. No, we can’t call each of them back with a personal explanation of why we didn’t choose to pass them along to our client. But we should send some correspondence, if even just an Email, to let them know their status. It may add some extra work to our already hectic weeks, but it will ensure that we don’t lose potential, future candidates.