Posted 6. April 2009, 08:51 by Rob Punshon
Category : Home   Learning & teaching developments

Three Months of tweaking tinkering and full-on re-writing have seen my Curriculum Vitae turn from a mediocre personal checklist to an epic achievements and skills portfolio, and in the current climate, it needs to be. According to the national statistics department 2.03 million people were unemployed in the UK by the end of January 2009, a figure at its highest since 1997. That means a lot of people applying for jobs.

So this brings me to the point of this blog post. What can really make you stand out from the crowd in these troubled times and get you the job you’re after and also what’s in store for the future of the CV? Maybe online communication has the answer…

I recently got sent this YouTube clip from a friend applying for a job in Queensland, Australia. The best job in the world in fact, literally.

It got me thinking, what if all jobs in the future required you to sum yourself up in 60 seconds to a camera in much the same way as you would on a Blue Peter Interview or Big Brother style audition? Each of the clips (I had a look through a few after that first one) asked you to rate them using a 1-5 scale. The higher your rating and the higher the amount of hits, the greater your chance – it would appear, of landing the dream job.

We’ve already seen collaborative information sites like Wikipedia and on a less serious note The Urban Dictionary for example, but is the job hunt likely to turn into a collaborative process as well? You get the job you’re after if you can successfully direct web traffic to your online video-CV and then as a secondary challenge manage to come out with a favourable rating perhaps? It could be the future of PR job applications at least. What better way to select a potential PR employee than actually setting them a live personal brief to demonstrate their online communications skills. They would have to do this in an interview anyway so why not just move that task forward a stage?

What are the negatives of this approach though? I was always taught not to include a photo on a hard copy CV because it increases the risk of discrimination, monster.co.uk even go as far as saying don’t include your date of birth now because of ‘ageism’ a factor that shouldn’t in theory decide if you are right for a job or not. If you use a video clip or even just a sound clip this introduces bias into the decision making process. Hair colour, tone of voice, ethnicity, wonky teeth – these are all examples of factors that might harm your chances at the job. You open yourself for more criticism and scrutiny.

But isn’t this the idea if you have the skills set and you are a confident communicator? It could put you head and shoulders above the competition if done correctly and maybe all it takes is this leap of faith. Personally I’ll stick to the paper version. My filmed interview about online shopping was enough to keep me well behind the camera. Give it a whirl if you’re brave enough and see how hard or easy it is. Could it really be the way forward for the CV?