Will the "video resume" get you a job?

Using Social Media to Get a Job – Does it Work?

Over the years, as economies globalise and changes in lifestyle patterns have created mindset shifts, the employer-employee relationship has also undergone a dynamic reassessment. So have the means and methods that companies and job seekers use to get employed. Driven by the technology world there are many platforms and portal that have created their mark in the recruitment industry.

In this article, we challenge the norms of recruitment strategies and query whether new-age recruitment methods are here to stay:

Using LinkedIn and Skype to get a Job

There are sites like LinkedIn and Sykpe, which serve as alternate job searching and interview platforms respectively. LinkedIn to job seekers is what Facebook is to the general population.

LinkedIn is great to advertise yourself and your past achievements, so that employers can readily assess your qualifications and even read recommendations about you from your past employers. But this means also that you should use LinkedIn wisely and get recommendations from the people in your network who are able to add credibility to your career standing.

This means doing a little research on your part to see where your LinkedIn connections ultimately link to. You don’t want a recommendation from a contact who, although is now in a great company, may have been linked to a company involved in fraud, for example. While we often think of LinkedIn as a way for people to put their resumes up so that headhunters could search for them, what this also means is that employers must also be mindful of what their online profiles through their employees are telling about their company, and whether they are able to attract the right talent with what is online.

Skype has been a platform to share things and experiences visually when apart. It has also come to become a mode of visual interviews. But certainly it only adds to limiting the distance then providing a systematic screening and filtration process on resumes for employers.

Using Job Portals/Online Classifieds to Get A Job

There are dozens of job portals and online classifieds these days that purport to send your resumes to your dream employers.

While it is easy to submit resumes to as many portals as possible, and to as many job openings there are, do not make the mistake of sending a generic resume to all of these employers. Your lack of sincerity will show through, and your resume equally easily trashed.

While it is great that many companies these days advertise their vacancies on their websites, you should still be mindful of writing to them as if you were putting pen to paper.

With the ease of submitting resumes, many candidates adopt a hit and miss approach - too often we receive resumes that have no cover letters, or are written generally, with no focus on the company you are applying to, and worse, copied in email to a whole bunch of other employers.

A resume is a portrayal of your work attitude, quality and dedication to excellence. A thoughtless email blast just shows that you are lazy, careless and uninterested in the job.

Changing Trend in resume submission

Besides submitting your resume online, how else could you add to your resume to ensure that it gets picked up by your potential employer? Out of the many ways there are, according to our research, employers are 60% more likely to open an online application if it comes with a video introduction of yourself.

There is no true replacement to actual face-to-face interviews but in this ever evolving digital world there are always newer methods of getting the edge over the competition which assist in a more profound systematic filtration process to get the right candidate for the right job.