KEY POINTS:
The man stands on the street in front of some impressive pillars, dressed in an overcoat and holding a piece of cardboard on which is scrawled, in the best beggar fashion: "Will film for food."
He introduces himself: "Hello, my name in Manolo Celi, I'm 28 years old,
I'm in Miami, Florida, and my current occupation is, well, looking for an occupation."
And so begins the aspiring film director's video resume. For three minutes, he shows his editing and cutting skills, wry sense of humour and creativity - essential attributes for any film director.
What you see is what you get, and certainly Celi's YouTube fans think it's good enough to get him a job (though, curiously enough, there is no indication on the page of whether it worked or not).
Celi is not alone - a YouTube search on "video resume" throws up 1800 hits. But it's no longer just aspiring film directors, political lobbyists and Americans who are going beyond the written word and selling themselves on video.
It's now happening here in New Zealand and the end products are no longer home-made, low-quality amateur productions.
Video resumes have actually been around for more than a decade. As Time magazine reported this year, some businesses were offering video resumes in the United States in the mid-90s.
But while the only way to store them was on a VHS - not easily sent to a prospective employer - the idea never really took off and nobody made any money.
With the advent of broadband, cheap recorders, DVDs and hard drives with more grunt than we dreamed of just 10 years ago, video resumes started to gain ground.
And once YouTube came into existence, it was only a matter of time before it was harnessed.
Video resumes have now become a real business proposition, with companies marketing to individual job seekers and recruitment agencies, offering packages that will, they say, make their applications stand out from the crowd, get the hiring manager's attention first and get them that job or placement.
Christchurch-based G Force Video resume (videoresume.im.co.nz) claims that using its service will "make you the most easily recalled candidate for the position". For $199 or more, it will send or email you a script which you can customise. From that script it will prepare cue cards, shoot and edit the video and add any special features you want. Once it's all done, you get to take your resume away on disk.
It's been operating for 18 months now and says demand has been low, with only 18 resumes produced.
However, 17 of those people got jobs, 15 of them the job they created the resume for. Founder Brian Gee says it's been used by job seekers in completely different fields.
Now another service has arrived in Auckland and Wellington. Australian company Candidates Alive (www.candidatesalive.com) launched into Australia and New Zealand in October and claims already to have made video resumes for 100 candidates. It is, says chief executive Jonathan Weinstock, "in negotiation" with several recruitment agencies in the two cities.
The two services differ in one very important respect - G Force is aimed squarely at candidates. The candidate has control of the resulting resume and retains copyright.
Candidates Alive, however, aims mainly at recruiters. Yes, it offers do-it-yourself video resumes to candidates - produced either via a webcam or at one of its professional studios (an Auckland studio is set to open in the New Year) - but Weinstock is clear that recruitment agencies are where the money is.
When agencies buy a package off Candidates Alive, they get the AV equipment, a professionally designed template branded for their company, training in how to produce professional video resumes and sample scripts.
They upload the resumes on to Candidates Alive's server - where they sit until the recruiter decides to take them down - and simply email a link to employers to view.
Under this system, recruiters retain copyright of the resumes they produce - candidates can check them to make sure they are all right, and can see how many times they've been viewed, but they have no control over the clips.
So who's using video resumes, and why? Weinstock agrees that it's probably the more "multimedia-savvy" Gen Y candidates who are agreeing to front up right now, but believes we'll all get used to the concept sooner or later.
"The feedback that we've had is that it's useful across a variety of industries, roles and career levels." But he does agree it's probably more useful in some industries and roles than others.
In any professional role, where presentation and communication ability are part of the job, a video resume will show a candidate's strengths, he says.
In more manual jobs, such attributes might not be so important. "It might not be relevant for fork-lift drivers."
And he says it's a real benefit to candidates to have a video resume - research carried out by Candidates Alive in the 12 months before launch showed that hiring managers presented with two traditional CVs, one of which was accompanied by a video resume, would click on the video resume before looking at anything else.
It's easy to see why - humans are visual creatures, we take in most information and do most of our communicating non-verbally, so the tendency will always be to look at someone rather than read about them. But is that necessarily a good thing?
Certainly, in the United States, there have been warnings about discrimination based on how a candidate looks, or presents, on video. On recruitment website ere.net, partner in recruitment company The A List Raghav Singh even warns of legal risks.
"There isn't any legislation or guidance around the use of video resumes, but the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] is already warning employers not to let any information related to race, gender or disability affect hiring decisions. It's not a reach to believe that a creative lawyer can make a case for discrimination if it's known a video resume was viewed before an individual was rejected."
Philippa Reed, chief executive of the Equal Employment Opportunities Trust, agrees the area is "fraught".
"It will highlight a person's appearance, and possibly their ability to perform on camera, which may be partially relevant to the role they're applying for - or not at all.
"It's a human tendency to connect most easily with people who are similar to ourselves. If we don't take account of this we run the risk of ending up with a homogenous team that is unable draw on the benefits of multiple perspectives."
Weinstock acknowledges the risk of race, gender or age-based discrimination may be more overt when a manager is viewing a video resume - but no matter what information employers are given, they still have to abide by all human rights legislation.
And there can be a positive flipside: "Ethnic candidates who might present and speak very well" have more of a chance on video than they do on paper, where they can be rejected simply because of their unusual name.
Lynne Thorne, a senior recruitment consultant with Sheffield, has worked with video resumes in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. They are most useful, she says, when dealing with roles that require presentation skills (senior executive roles, sales and marketing), or for overseas candidates, when they can serve as another layer of filtering before deciding on a face-to-face interview - which can be costly.
But she disputes that they confer an advantage in terms of getting the recruiter's attention in the first place.
"If I had a CV that was paper, I'm not going to turn it away just because there isn't an interactive version. I'm going to look at the skills and what's needed in the market and I'm still going to treat them exactly the same way."
Weinstock agrees that video resumes will never take over completely from the traditional CV. "The video resume is another part of the recruitment process, it won't replace the paper CV," he says. "It's a one- to two-minute snapshot of a person. For more detailed information the hiring manager will still go to the CV."
Gee says G Force resumes have "not been a great success to date" and believes that's because the concept is still very new.
"Our marketing consultant thinks that it could take up to six years to catch on."
Thorne goes even further - she doubts they will ever become as popular in New Zealand as they have become in the United States or are becoming in Australia. She worked in a recruitment company that offered the service across Australia and New Zealand in 2004 and, she says, the uptake was about 85 per cent in Australia but only 30 per cent in New Zealand - and she believes the reasons are cultural.
"I think it's because Australia's a much more American culture. I think the video market didn't really take off because people would still rather phone up and have an interview."
