HireVue Bringing Talent Into Focus

Video is coming to a hiring process near you. From advertising your company’s positions to interviewing candidates, video is the next wave in effectively and efficiently connecting your candidates with your hiring managers.

If you think about it – you can have all the candidates in the world but if you can’t figure out the best means to get them in front of managers quickly you 1) have a great chance at losing the candidate and 2) give your company the reputation of being slow, unresponsive and rude.

From the manager’s perspective, by making the hiring process arduous and inconvenient, you turn hiring into a chore not an opportunity.

Video does belong in the hiring process. We would not be in business if we didn’t think so.
For video to succeed in the hiring process there needs to be two things:

1) Spontaneity from the candidate – canned, recorded, edited responses are never useful

2) Company control – companies should be able to determine (to a certain extent) what is going to be in those videos i.e. they pick the questions that get responded to.

The recruiting world has been inundated recently with the idea of the video resume.

First this video resume hits Wall Street from a total tard -

Then “video resumes are great” gets on www.careerjournal.com

Then this on www.recruiting.com

Now Jobster has video resumes as a prime feature on their profiles (at least Dave Lefkow disagreed until he converted back)

Heather Hamilton at Microsoft came right out with it and said in responding to Jeremy Langhans (we love you Jeremy):

“I can’t keyword search video resumes, I find them pretty self-indulgent and when you get hundreds of resumes for a job posting, who has time to look at videos. I think that Aleksey has proven that some people find it totally comfortable to lie on a video resume. I’m not looking to fill positions with people that perform well on video, I’m looking to fill positions with people that perform well in the job. Either way, it requires an interview. Plus video resumes make it more difficult, not less, to narrow the funnel of candidates. Video resumes are flash and I’m looking for substance. A good one may get the attention of someone (and I\’ve seen one good video resume ever…that French speaking cartoon one….you know the one) due to it being clever but otherwise I’m not interested in them and I’ve got nowhere to store them and no time to watch all of them.”

Hank Stringham (hire.com, itzbig.com) once told me that in the 1980s he used to record roughnecks in the backwoods of the deep south oil fields for his clients to recruit. He believes in video and so he did video resumes back 25 years ago.

Video conferencing has helped in some cases and video tape interviews were used by Hank and Jim Dick from Candidate Quality Management. I believe though that video resumes are not the answer.

What do people go to YouTube for? Entertainment!

Are you going to go onto MySpace to watch a video resume of some person that has posted their right next to the pictures of them passed out at party and the comments section saying “Man, I can’t believe you did that the other night – you were sooo blazed, it was a great party”.

There is something about confidentiality in a job search – where candidates and companies know that their transaction is private. There is something about security in a job search where you know that your video resume won’t be written about in the Wall Street Journal or posted on You Tube with the caption – “Look at this dope”.

Most of all and what is most important to recruiters and companies, there needs to be QUALITY in filling a position.

Heather nailed it right on the head – people lie on resumes and people lie on video. Any “user generated” content, in this case candidate generated content, must be taken with a grain of salt. In Freakonomics, it is suggested that over 50% of people lie on their resume. What happens in the 50 takes when a candidate is trying to record a video resume?

Video in the hiring process is great. Video resumes aren’t.

-Mark Newman