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Mark Lucker reviewed the video resume site WorkBlast and found the concept to be highly flawed. You can read the review here. Phillip Thune, CEO of another video resume site, defends the video resume, and Mark responds.

Have some thoughts on this issue? Email us and we will post along with the letter and response.

Dear Mark,
We read your review of WorkBlast on the Training Media Review site.

We disagree with your view of the video resume. The main purpose, in our view, is to help both the employer and candidate save time. How often have you determined in the first two minutes of an interview that that the candidate is not going to get the job? When that happens, you either have to be extremely rude and cut the interview short, or you have to waste another 20 minutes with a candidate that has no shot.

While a video resume (or a written resume, for that matter) is not enough to decide whether to hire someone, a video resume can help determine that the person is not qualified and that can save the recruiter a lot of time. I think the candidate would rather learn that she is not getting the job after submitting a video resume than have to get dressed up, travel to an employer's office, wait for the interview, go through the interview, travel home, follow up, and then find out.

We also don't think that a candidate needs to spend serious money on doing the video resume. On our site, registered users have access to all kinds of help on creating a video resume, including sample video resumes (both good and bad) and scripts. All of the samples were shot with an inexpensive camcorder in front of a blank wall.

As for discrimination, we have consulted with top employment attorneys, who feel that video resumes do provide employers with valuable information about a candidate's qualifications for a job—including their communication skills, energy level, career highlights and skills, and knowledge of a particular industry or occupation. These are all things that an employer notes from an in-person interview and can legally be used to make a hiring decision.

With respect to WorkBlast—first, the site is not free. It is free for job candidates to post a video resume, but employers have to pay WorkBlast to post a job and get access to the database of candidates. So a WorkBlast candidate's video resume can only be seen by a very small number of WorkBlast registered companies.

I know we're biased, but we feel HireMeNow.com is the best place for a candidate to post a video resume. We let candidates invite any employer to view their profile (a video resume, written resume, and answers to key questions every employer wants to know). And all of this is free to both the candidate and the employer. The profiles are password-protected so candidates control who can see them. And it's much more professional than posting a video resume on YouTube or MySpace, as our site was designed for employers and candidates.

Thanks for the chance to respond to your review.

Phillip Thune
Chief Executive Officer
HireMeNow.com
917.653.2227

Mark Lucker responds:
Thanks for the feedback, Phil. I certainly appreciate what you are trying to accomplish with video resumes (and your site), but I continue to think the concept is fundamentally flawed.

Make no mistake. I favor a very aggressive job search approach. The job seeker is responsible for networking his way into an interview and following through and following up—not the potential employer. The days of applying for a job, then waiting for the employer to call are gone; but I’m not sure that the job market is prepared to benefit by this concept.

One thing we both seem to agree on: the entire job-seeking and hiring system is broken and in need of a major overhaul. But I still don’t believe video resumes are the solution. In my view, they are just another version of the problem.

One of the fundamental concerns that I see with video resumes is the same issue I have with paper resumes: they still must be reviewed by someone lower than the hiring manager on the employment food chain, usually a human resources representative of some sort or a company recruiter.

As a general rule, those receiving and reviewing traditional resumes aren’t well trained in how to review the paper versions. Are they going to be any better equipped to review and choose appropriate candidates from a video? Unless your firm can offer courses in how to properly evaluate candidates through a video process, I’m skeptical that the video route will offer any improvement in the situation. Who will be culling candidates from WorkBlast?

Until business as a whole wises up and gets HR out of the hiring process altogether or video resumes are only going to be seen directly by hiring managers or top-notch headhunters (many of whom I think would shy away on principle), you have, in my mind, simply turned a pile-of-paper problem into a stack-of-DVDs or excessive downloads problem.

Does a video resume really save time? If I’m a hiring manager reviewing a stack of resumes, I can easily whittle a pile of 100 candidates down to a more manageable 10 to 15 candidates in about 10 minutes. If I’m a hiring manager with 100 resumes to go through on a website, I’m looking at 10 minutes simply waiting for the online videos to load, not including actually viewing them.

As for browsing on a website, how often will that be a 10-minute event? When WorkBlast makes more and more resumes available in one place, I can easily see a lot more time spent on the process, as employers seek the better digital needle in the web haystack.

To be fair, I can easily see how finding a couple of potential candidates on WorkBlast might prompt a second, third, or even fourth look at a video—it's good to get another take on someone or the impressions of others—but there goes even more of your supposed time savings.

In your response to my initial review, you wrote, "How often have you determined in the first two minutes of an interview that that the candidate is not going to get the job? When that happens, you either have to be extremely rude and cut the interview short, or you have to waste another 20 minutes with a candidate that has no shot."

All good points but I think missing some perspective. If you have an interview that is going badly after two minutes, I have to wonder if the fault lies more with the interviewer and his interviewing skills and inability to work past initial impressions of a candidate.

Most good hiring managers and headhunters I know understand that interviewing is stressful and that it will often take some time for the interviewer and candidate to find some sort of equilibrium. The problems of hiring managers and recruiters regularly getting into "bad interviews" are an issue of poor phone screening and interviewing techniques —not a resume problem.

Your observation that “while a video resume (or a written resume, for that matter) is not enough to decide whether to hire someone, a video resume can help determine that the person is not qualified and that can save the recruiter a lot of time” is valid, but I feel compelled to ask a simple question: How does a video resume help determine if a candidate is qualified or not?

It could certainly help demonstrate a candidate’s on-camera presence, general poise, or a winning customer service smile, but I’m not sure how a video demonstrates tangible skills like, say, how someone improved the effectiveness of a supply chain or how their reallocation of resources saved their last company a half-million dollars. Now if you want a video of Jill the widgetmaker making widgets at the speed of light, you might have something…unless you’re not looking for a widgetmaker.

Yes, in training job seekers, we encourage them to shape their accomplishments and achievements into a persuasive story for interviews, but is that compelling live-interview technique enhanced by rehearsing and polishing a tale and recording it, posting the smoothest version online or sending out a DVD?

I doubt it. In fact, I see even more potential for hiring managers and recruiters to be duped by someone who puts together a slick, well rehearsed video resume and who then shows up in person and bombs the interview.

I have many years of experience in broadcasting and in community theater and feel pretty confident that I could get a lot of my job-seeking clients to rehearse, record, and distribute a pretty compelling video presentation—that would demonstrate absolutely nothing about how well they react to or in a given situation.

A video resume is by its very nature no longer a resume; it is essentially a recorded, one-sided interview. How much of an interview is devoted to seeing how candidates think on their feet in a stressful situation? Don’t most hiring managers or recruiters want a sense of how a candidate reacts to a situation on the fly? If they start looking for interviewing traits (which, given human nature, they invariably will) in video resumes, they are going to be sorely disappointed.

And what about those candidates who just don’t come across well on video? Say I’ve got a candidate who is great one-on-one but not on camera. Then what? If video resumes become the standard recruitment vehicle for a company and I’ve got job seekers who aren’t photogenic, don’t seem at ease, don’t sound quite right, or just have little outward charisma but are immensely qualified, then what? Why would a company seek to summarily exclude a large pool of potentially strong but not media savvy candidates?

And no, viewing a video of someone is not the same as gathering visual and personal insight on someone in person. Unless you’re an FBI profiler, I doubt you’re going to glean much more from a video of someone talking about his or her career accomplishments than from a well-written paper resume. Candidates run a higher risk of being rejected outright because of shifting eyes, bobbing head, or some other perceived visual quirk. People are different when a camera is turned on them. Again, what kind of training are you offering employers, recruiters, and headhunters on how to view and interpret video resumes?

Phil, you said of WorkBlast, "It's much more professional than posting a video resume on YouTube or MySpace." That may be true, but it may also be the single biggest flaw I see with WorkBlast and video resumes in general.

Were I advising an employer who had a strong urge to start trolling for candidates via video resumes, I would probably be inclined to have them browse YouTube or MySpace first instead of WorkBlast or a similar site on the grounds that the more natural, spontaneous, and un-filtered a site is, the better.

Why buy the cow when you can get the sour milk for free?