Getting in the door with a multimedia resume

After years of being scoffed at by human resource professionals, video and multimedia resumes are finally getting attention, says Joyce L. Gioia, a strategic business futurist and CEO of The Herman Group.

“Younger job seekers are embracing technology,” she says. In a tight labor market, people are doing everything they can so that their resumes don’t end up lost among endless piles of paper.

Gioia believe the die-hards stuck in the HR past need to be more open to newfangled resumes, because “eventually ink on paper will go away completely.”

Indeed, who needs a resume when you have a LinkedIn account, right? Social networking sites provide a great way to put all your information online in a nice organized format.

But noooo. When I asked a number of HR experts and hiring managers about multimedia alternatives, their first reaction was, “We still want the paper resume.”

Why?

“The HR staff is drowning in paper, but like a government program, HR systems die hard,” says David Lewis, regional manager for Express Employment Professionals in Oklahoma City. “By introducing a non-typical resume, you may actually make the HR staff’s job harder while potentially exposing them to a lawsuit.”

This has been the main argument in HR circles for some time now. The thinking is that these visual media open an employer up to litigation because suddenly you can see the person’s race, or maybe find out about their religious affiliation based on a video or social media profile.

I asked a few HR experts about the legal ramifications, and most said, given the ever-changing technological landscape, hiring managers can look up so much of this information via a Google search today that the argument is moot.

That said, nothing will keep a prospective employer from making a quick judgment call when they see your photo, a video of you, or your personal background on Facebook, says Jerry Glass, president of F&H Solutions Group, a human resources consulting firm.

“The demise of the paper resume is greatly exaggerated,” says Glass. “It’s still, by far, the dominant way to get in front of prospective employer.”

Nothing to lose
For many job seekers, creating a video of themselves or pulling together a hip-looking multimedia resume may not be up their alley. So you risk doing more harm than good if you send off a dopey video of yourself or you don’t look ready to take on the job.

If you’ve sent out hundreds of resumes to no avail, what do you have to lose?

But be prepared to possibly shell out some dough. Dougherty’s video cost about $400, and he had to go to the company’s film studio in San Francisco, where a professional director coached him in the best way to present himself. The price included a secure URL for the video.

Other options, such as the VisualCV, are free to job seekers. Most social media sites also offer free services where you can post your accomplishments and include a host of links.

Ari Herzog, laid off last year from the Newburyport Mayor’s office where he was an assistant chief administrative officer, has pretty much abandoned the traditional resume.

Recently he applied for a job at a Boston based advertising agency he heard about through a friend. Instead of just uploading his resume on Monster.com, he reached out to a contact on LinkedIn who worked for the firm and had that person forward his LinkedIn profile and the multimedia resume URL to the recruiter.

“A couple of days later, I got a call asking for a phone interview,” he says. “Ultimately I was not hired, but it’s proof the system works.”