Getting a More Complete Picture

Building on my last post regarding the difficulties with the hiring process, I’ve been thinking about how to solve one of the problems HR representatives raised.  Namely, the difficulty they face in being able to get a sense of the person beyond the written description that any resume, cover letter, or LinkedIn profile can provide and get a true feel for who the candidate is.

We’ve all heard the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” so adding video may prove to be a powerful tool for LinkedIn.  Some of the ways video could be integrated are:

>Summary Videos* – These videos would be used to supplement the written summary section of your LinkedIn profile.  Having a video summary of who a candidate is would be useful and allow the HR representatives to get a better sense of who the person is, before progressing them to the face to face interview.  This would seem to be of particular use for positions that require lots of interpersonal communication (eg – sales and business development).

>Stock HR Interview Q&A – We’ve all prepared for interviews and had to go through answering what I call stock HR questions (eg – ‘What are your strengths/weaknesses?’, ‘What are your career aspirations?’, ‘Can you give an example of a time when you were faced with a difficult situation and how did you deal with it?’).   By providing a list of these questions and having video answers to them a HR representative could take care of this portion of the interview on their own terms/schedule.

>Requested Q&A – Either on the job page, company page or via InMail, a company could request that a candidate provide video clip answers of certain pre-selected questions. 

Having these videos on LinkedIn would not completely eliminate the need for interviews, but it would seem to provide an added level of detail by which companies could refine their recruiting efforts.  Despite the benefits the idea faces a lot of criticism.  In light of those opinions I wanted to reach out to HR and recruiting personnel to get their thoughts, so please post your comments.

*Note: You can currently upload videos to your LinkedIn profile and I have included LinkedIn video upload instructions.  Having this ability is great, but there needs to be more structure around its use so members have a better idea of how to use it and also there needs to be more of an effort made to let users know about the option.  Personally, I was unaware of the capability until I did a Google search on the topic.