Keppie Careers

Social media speaker, social media consultant, job search coach

Your visual resume — do you need a chart to tell your story?

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Today, Penelope Trunk blogged about the value and importance of the visual. She explains in her post, Next phase of your career: Design,”This means that you will be more valuable and more relevant if you can think in terms of visuals.”

This topic has been on my mind for the past several days, especially, as I have been reviewing Visualize.me, the same infographic tool Penelope highlights in her post. What I’ve been grappling with is the disconnect between what is “cool” and “new” — even cutting edge — and what is actually useful for job seekers.

Remember VisualCV? (Maybe not?) It was an early tool to help job seekers demonstrate their skills and experience online.  It was useful for job seekers to be able to pretty easily have online versions of their resumes. However, it turns out VisualCV wasn’t as useful as everyone thought, as it was not helpful for being found online; it was more a mechanism for sharing an online link with people who’d be impressed you had a photo and resume they could see by clicking through. (Update: they are actually closing up shop and won’t exist after December, 2011.)

Today, it’s not very hard to put up information online. There are lots of services making it really easy. Just a few (from my book, Social Networking for Career Success):

http://www.weebly.com/features.html
http://www.wix.com/
http://www.doyoubuzz.com/us/
http://www.zooloo.com/
http://brand-yourself.com/
http://www.webs.com/
http://carbonmade.com/
http://chi.mp/
http://flavors.me/

I believe job seekers should have a social resume — an online place to showcase and highlight their skills, but it’s not always the best idea to jump on the easiest or least expensive service to do it. For one thing, you never know when ads may show up alongside your personal information, or if a service will go under and leave you in the lurch. It’s not always totally intuitive what to include and how to showcase the best you have to offer online — it’s not always a case of “more is better.”

The same goes for infographics, which is why I’ve been reserving judgement and not writing about them. If you’re a graphic artist and create your OWN infographic resume, highlighting and showcasing not only your resume, but the visual skills you will use on the job, there’s no question in my mind a very customized resume along the lines of what Visualize.Me provides is a value add to your job hunt. It’s important to keep an eye on hiring managers in your field and what they need and want, though. It’s possible (likely) their systems still require the more traditional text resume, which you should always have handy. No doubt, there’s a disconnect between what we can create and what hiring managers and systems can use. When even a PDF may not be a good choice, think twice when you apply with a totally visual document.

Knowing how to tell your story — and how to tell it well — is not going out of style, even as the places and ways we showcase what we offer do change. As Penelope reminded us in her post,

“Short is good, and concise is fun, and in a world where we have too many facts, we appreciate a quick picture that synthesizes facts into something meaningful rather than a summary of disjointed facts.”

However, I don’t know that a literal picture is always the best answer to the question of how to demonstrate our value. A story — using words, and a hook to compel the reader to want to know more — can be equally appealing, interesting and attractive.

Infographics are sexy now. A chart is novel, a flow of your work life, especially if it is actually interesting and makes a case to hire you, is a potential positive. However, as with anything job search related, the most important thing to do is consider your target audience and their needs. Unless your chart will be unique and special and appeal to them, I’d think twice before assuming your “outside of the box” approach (and how unique is it really once all of the career bloggers are blogging about it?) is going to be the thing that lands you a job.

I’ve been personally thinking about this as it relates to my website. I’m planning a bit of an overhaul in an effort to bring my site in line with my business objectives. However, I’m still convinced it’s the content on the site and information people find that drives them (you!) here. Hopefully, the visual experience right now is pleasant, but I’m guessing I could have the most beautiful, cutting-edge visual site, but if I couldn’t support it with content, I’d have a lot less visitors.

Focus on being able to tell your story – IN WORDS – in a way that is as appealing and attractive as a pretty chart, and I’m betting you will be far ahead of the crowd.

photo by roger4336

Video Resumes – Not the Next Big Thing (Yet)

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My cyber-friend, Chris Russel, of Secrets of the Job Hunt Network, recently shared this information about video resumes:

MENLO PARK, Calif., July 31 /PRNewswire/ — In an increasingly competitive job market, applicants are looking for new ways to stand out from the crowd, but a recent survey suggests submitting a video resume may not be the answer. Just one in four (24 percent) senior executives interviewed said their companies accept video resumes from candidates.

The survey was developed by Robert Half International, the world’s first and largest staffing services firm specializing in accounting and finance. It was conducted by an independent research firm and is based on
interviews with 150 senior executives from the nation’s 1,000 largest companies.

Executives were asked, “Does your company accept video resumes from job seekers?” Their responses:
Yes ……………………24%
No …………………….58%
Don’t know ………..18%

“Before submitting a video resume, job candidates should check with the hiring manager to ensure the company does not have a policy against their use in evaluating candidates,” said Max Messmer, chairman and CEO of Robert Half International and author of Job Hunting For Dummies(R), 2nd Edition (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).

Although there are certainly some great uses for video resumes, for example when the job involves being on screen or making presentations, I was not surprised to learn that they are not yet widely accepted.

My thinking?

  • Viewing video resumes takes too long. Conventional wisdom is saying that resumes receive an 8-second glance. It takes that long to load and press “play” for a video resume. Most employers are too impatient and don’t have time to take these seriously right now.
  • In my opinion, no one should send a video resume without being coached on how to look, what to wear, what to do with their hands, how not to fidget. The list goes on and on. The fact is, looking good on camera requires more than sitting in front of it. The camera itself and the person BEHIND the camera can have a lot to do with the finished product. If you don’t have a coach and an expert behind the scenes, consider the fact that your video resume will look like a 5th-grade humanities project.
  • Many organizations worry about bias. Having a visual as the first impression of a candidate is not traditional in U.S. hiring, and using videos may open the door to charges of discrimination. This is not to say that a video is the only way to see what someone looks like, but using it as a screening tool can open up employers to problems.

The fact is, unless your job requires being on camera, demonstrating your skill (or lack thereof) in this medium is not of much value. Unless you are fabulously attractive, well spoken, coached in the best ways to appear on camera AND have great camera operators and technology to back it all up, stick to a paper resume or consider an on-line resume that allows links and a portfolio, such as visualcv.com if you MUST do something different. (Keeping in mind that most employers don’t have more than 8 seconds for your documents!)

What do you think of video resumes? Does your company allow them? Would you consider using one?

Video resume! You don’t even have any resume! Need a great resume? Some help to write the perfect cover letter? I’m here to help! Write to me.

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photo by ianbwarner

VisualCV – Is this the resume wave of the future?

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It’s all the buzz this week.  A company called VisualCV claims to be reinventing the resume.  It allows video, pictures and a portfolio, graphics and “other supporting documents.”  The point is to make your resume come alive and potentially eliminate the need for a first interview.  (The idea being that you’ll be providing so much information, the employer won’t need to meet you to decide if you are a good fit.)

No one wants to stop progress, but I am having a hard time visualizing these being the “next big thing.”  The main issue is a topic for any video resume.  Many in the hiring industry hate these resumes because of the potential discrimination issues and the fact that it takes longer than 7-10 seconds (the time allowed to quickly review a paper resume) to review something online.

Do employers REALLY want to see an online copy of your transcript (it’s not very official that way)?  You can post examples of your work.  However, what issues are there in posting work product that you’ve done for a particular employer online for another employer to see?  Is it really necessary or useful to post a bar chart of your income?  The site suggests that an applicant could post a video of themselves addressing a gap in their resume.  Will an employer actually sit through that?

Let’s not even touch on the fact that most people who haven’t had professional training don’t come across very professionally on video.  It can be difficult enough to present well in an in-person interview, let along producing a slick looking piece for an online resume.

This seems like a great opportunity for those in very creative industries who would have a portfolio of work to demonstrate or who could benefit from a way to combine video with their resume without having to start from scratch.  However, for the rest of the working world, this brave new resume (with the ironic moniker of a CV – how retro) seems like a lot of lights and mirrors.

It’s almost as if tech people want to press these creative resume opportunities in hopes that the more they offer them, the more likely employers are going to want to see them.

Of course it makes sense for the resume to move to the next level, but it seems to me that it must be done in a way that meets criteria for the end users, not only in a way that allows the job seeker to demonstrate their life story.

Keppie Careers will help you put your best foot forward!  We offer resume writing, mock interviews and career coaching for every candidate.  www.keppiecareers.com