If a picture is worth a thousand words then so too is the first impression the candidate has on a prospective employer. Unfortunately the problem with the first impression is that 900 of those 1000 words are likely very wrong! This only gets more complicated when the candidate decides to include a video snapshot.

Unfortunately most of these video productions are extremely low budget home grown efforts utilizing insufficient technology with an el-cheep-o digital camera that included a video feature, poor lighting, terrible audio and the scripting is something akin to a police interview.  The end product is not something that usually helps the candidate; in fact it is something quite different.

A number of agencies jumped on the video bandwagon and quickly discovered it was not nearly as effective as they first believed. The agencies operational cost went up significantly and the outcome was not measurably improved over the traditional method of presenting a candidate.  In fact video often ended up shooting the candidate in the foot.

Here are some examples of what can go wrong with a video:

• The candidate is struggling with a weight issue (like most Americans) and the camera only adds to this image.  If the hiring company is looking for someone who has the stamina to do whatever it takes to succeed in the job, the video image may suggest something quite different.
• The candidate has a poor command of language with poor word and phrase use. They may stutter or slur or mumble in their speech. They may have an MBA or a Ph.D. but they end up projecting something quite different.
• The candidate may be viewed as too senior for the job.
• The candidates clothing suggests a fashion of a bygone era. Worse yet their clothing suggests a future era!
• Etc Etc Etc

What is a hiring company looking for?

When a hiring company is looking for candidates they typically end up weeding through dozens of resumes and usually narrow it down to a small handful of candidates to select to interview. The weeding is another way of saying the candidate goes through a filtering process by the hiring company that lines up with what attributes the hiring company is looking for in a candidate. The filtering includes relevant experience, age, sex, education, location etcetera.  The video ends up being added to the filtering process and considering what I just mentioned above, the video is not likely to add to the candidates success in getting the job interview.

As always there are exceptions to all rules.  If you are going to include a video with your resume to prospective employers I encourage you not cut any corners in the production area and be sensitive to the possibility that your video could end up the reason why you didn’t get the interview not the other way around.

Relative to the resume, everyone is in sales. I don’t care if you are an accountant, a warehouse supervisor, a supply chain executive or the VP of Human Resources.  You are selling a product and in this instance the product is you!

One of the fundamentals in sales is that people buy benefits, not features.  Give some thought to your last handful of purchases and reflect on why you actually chose one product over another.  Was it really the feature that drove your purchase or was it the benefit you would experience because the particular feature enabled it? The fact is it always comes down to the benefits of a feature, not the other way around.  Further, think about what motivated you to buy that product in the first place. What was the problem you were trying to get resolved?  All products are designed to solve a problem, otherwise else no one would buy them!

So with this as a backdrop, take a look at your resume and think of yourself as the product.  For any given employment advertisements you need to ask yourself, does my product (me) solve this employer’s problem?  If so, then how do my benefits improve on other candidates (competitor for the job you are going after!) benefits? Benefits present themselves as relevant experience and performance outcomes. It is no benefit to the hiring company if you performed similar duties before but made no positive impact while you did them. It is also no benefit to the employer if you were impactful in a certain job that has nothing to do with the job the employer is looking to fill.

The hiring company already pretty much knows what they are looking for in a candidate as they endeavor to fill an open position.  In today’s economy the employee’s productivity is everything.  Employers are rarely looking for candidates that can do the job. Employers are always looking for candidates that already did that job.  It minimizes the chance that the new employee would fail at their job and rapidly increases the time that the new hire employee becomes productive.  This is why the candidate with more relative experience will be favored over one that does not.

I challenge you to take a look at your resume and consider if you are only presenting features and not nearly enough benefits.  Every time you list a feature about yourself on your resume you should ask yourself, who cares? The answer to that question will more often spell the difference in your getting the job or not.