3/14/07

I’m ready for my close-up, boss

Tri-O's Oddities, observations, and opinions
By Herb Kandel

There was a time in America when all an employer had to do to hire an employee was to put a "HELP WANTED" sign visible on the street. In Boston in the mid 1800’s the first known private employment agency was established. They were crude by contemporary standards. They consisted of merely listing available labor and making these lists available to the employer. A small fee was charged to the applicant for registering and a larger fee if a job was accepted. Most jobs were in the blue-collar category. It was during World War I that employment agencies aided the government by finding, screening, and testing. The filing system was improved which led to placing people in government and in war plants. After the war, agencies did a remarkable job in relocating personnel into peacetime positions. During the Depression the government set up a network of tax supported employment agencies primarily for semi-skilled and unskilled workers while most employers still used private employment agencies for skilled, white-collar, and technical personnel. Most private agencies were applicant paid until the mid 1970’s when the employer paid fees started attracting the applicants who felt that their talents and skills were part of the employers obligations.

The main tool to open the door when applying for a new job had been the résumé. The one or two page sheet listing objective, education, experience, and qualifications. Statistically for every 200 résumé's received by the average employer only one interview is granted. The résumé that took days to get ‘just right’ will be quickly scanned, rather than read, and evaluated in ten to 20 seconds. If the first impression fails to impress a prospective employer to read further, it goes into the circular file.

Fast forward to the age of the Internet. The ink on paper is being replaced by the pixel on the screen. For the past 15 years job seekers have been posting their résumés on numerous Internet sites. The latest tweak is the video résumé, or as I call it, the vidomé. Go to You Tube, there you can view two to five minute uploaded vidomés from candidates seeking interviews, over 1500 of them. There are other sites that feature potential workplaces and another that uses webcams to pose real-time interview questions to candidates ( they prep the candidate, i.e., be well groomed, dress appropriately, do not chew gum or smoke).

In ‘the old days’ (pre-pixels) companies and recruiters would not accept résumés that had photos attached because of potential law suits. Many résumés that were submitted omitted the persons name by substituting a numeric ID, citing instances that bias might be shown by favoring certain racial sounding names.

Human resources departments are now in a quandary. Will viewing a vidomé invite a lawsuit by the videoed candidate who feels they were disqualified because of age, race, disability, or gender? Another wrinkle is that paper and typing words on it is available to everyone, not so the computer and web cam, and this may open the door for additional litigation .

As more and more applicants utilize this mode of presentation the more sophisticated they will become and the candidate who gets the in-person interview may not be the most qualified but the one who has a touch of a Steven Spielberg. A vidomé may have poor lighting or is unsteady which is the equivalent of having a typo on the printed résumé. A recent survey listed the responses from 150 senior executives at the nation’s 1,000 largest companies. Executives were asked "How many typos in a résumé does it take for you to decide not to consider a job candidate for a position with your company?" Their responses: one typo, 47 percent; two typos, 37 percent; four or more typos, 6 percent; and no answer, 3 percent. So extreme attention to detail is a must for all job seekers.

In the long run it will be the employers who will determine if vidomés are a viable avenue for the job seeker. Time to review any form of solicitation being a major factor. It is a rare human resource person who will spent five minutes studying a single video when he/she could have evaluated 15 to 20 in that same time. Though the vidomé is a small current fad I believe paper over pixel will win just like paper over rock. And have you noticed a complete turn-around to the ‘old days’ with billboards and window signs almost pleading "NOW HIRING"? Who knows, the next innovative form may be a return to sandwich signs.
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