Green Tea Ice Cream

A sceptic writes:

I had a preview about how ‘future recruitment’ might work some years ago when I was part of a panel reviewing some 1600 video clips of would-be online video stars.  Let’s just say that the process was both intensely wearisome and less than rigorous – I mean SIXTEEN HUNDRED VIDEO CLIPS!  You try evaluating that little lot fairly.

Now imagine you work for A Gigantic Investment Bank and some snake oil salesmen has managed to convince your Head of Recruitment that video CVs are the The Future.  You’re the CV sifter.  Now go and watch this sixteen hundred times.

Look, I’m not saying that the video CV format won’t one day evolve into something useful but in the meantime

1. They’re a discriminatory nightmare waiting to happen (“I didn’t get an interview because I wear a headscarf/beard/am clinically obese/female/male”).  There’s a reason why first round trawls of CVs/application forms are anonymized in big organisations and that reason is the mitigation of the risk of discrimination or victimisation.  And actually, that’s a good, appropriate thing – the best of us struggle with some level of unconscious prejudice and applying discriminatory little hermeneutic shortcuts is all too easy when dealing with this much information
2. This brings me to my next point – videos provide too much information about a candidate, most of it has to be processed ‘intuitively’ and very little of it is germane to the role in question.  Free-form interviews are notoriously bad at predicting job success (as opposed to the relative discipline offered by structured interviews) and a video CV is a one-sided free-form interview where the recruiter gets to concentrate in detail on considering exactly why the applicant chose that awful shirt (see secondary discrimination again, above).
3. Video interviews offer an infinite amount of opportunities to show you, the candidate, in the worst possible light.  See “shirt”, above.
4. Life’s too short.  A few weeks back I waded through ninety CVs.  I can’t imagine ever wanting to watch ninety videos.

In the interests of fairness, there are a number of things which might make video CVs useful:

1. Video search technology that sifts videos automatically in the same way soft copies of CVs can be sifted, looking for keywords, concrete expressions and so on.  A video equivalent of the kind of software that does buzz monitoring on social media networks, perhaps.
2. Very well formed enterprise platforms for recruiters to manage and review video resumes
3. A lot of training in schools and universities on how to present yourself on camera and how to edit ‘talking head’ videos

Or perhaps we could invest all that time and effort in something more useful.