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Wednesday 19th of November 2008

Video CV’s discrimination or not?

By Riges Younan

Here is an interesting post by Louise of UK Recruiter fame about Video CV’s and discrimination in the recruiting process. My view is that video CV’s may increase the chances of discrimination earlier in the recruiting process assuming the recruiter/hirer has time to view the CV in the first place. Secondly, in a market where the supply and demand equation is still heavily in favour of the supply side ( and I don’t see that changing materially in the short to medium term) what type of candidates have the time to sit and record a video CV in the first place.. certainly not the highly sought after ‘passive’ (don’t like term that much but anyway) candidates.. why? because they are too busy doing what they do best… WORKING!.. what do you think?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Recruiting, commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

comments to “Video CV’s discrimination or not?”

Lisa Scales said at October 21st, 2008 6:03 am :

I love the fact I am in a business where such lively debate can occur - who said Web 2.0 technology businesses were boring!

The use of video in the hiring process is here and gaining in popularity due to increase costs of travel, lack of time and the transient nature of human beings in general.

What we have done at Talent on View is offer a video solution Software as a Service to let the recruiter/hiring manager do with it what they will and how they want to use it - it is a flexible tool which can be used at any point in the hiring process and with the evidence we collected (we interviewed over 400 HR/Recruitment/Resourcing/Hiring/Talent Managers)82% said they felt that video would give them the ability to make a more informed decision. Talent on View streams the video live to our servers, enables a recruiter/hiring manager to send a video to a contact or multiple contacts via an encrypted link - there is no format, file size or firewalls to worry about.

Alot of negative feedback comes across by people saying “I sift through 10 CV’s in a minute and therefore have no time to watch a 30 second clip of someone aswell” - have these people stopped and asked themselves what assumptions they have based on a piece of paper? Have they missed out on some amazing candidates because they weren’t the No1 CV writer in the world? No because they wouldnt like to admit that actually quality not quantity wins the day every time when it comes to filling positions - it happens at every stage of the process and if people slowed down and took stock there wouldnt be such an almighty rush in the world!

The discrimination blog I wrote that Louise kindly referred to has been discussed at length by some fairly heavy weight HR types and no one can disagree with the fact that people are just as likely to discrimate on paper or in person as they would using video.

http://www.talentonview.com

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