I see a lot of press releases highlighting new companies in the talent acquisition space. It breaks down pretty close to this: 80 percent are been-there-done-that, 10 percent are categorized as pretty solid ideas, 5 percent are home runs, and another 5 percent are filed under WTF.
Put O’Hire squarely in WTF.
Let’s start with the name. How the hell do I type this into my browser? I can’t do apostrophes, but surely people will try. Is it just www.ohire.com? And how do I search for this on Google, who clearly thinks I’m searching for information on O’Hare Airport in Chicago. Turns out, www.o-hire.com leads you to the promised land.
How many Internet successes can you name with an apostrophe in its name and a hyphenated URL? Yep, none.
Now to the product. The company’s presser read, “Would you be interested in covering a newly launched app which provides job seekers, a golden opportunity to express their skills with the help of a small video? This way they can bring out their actual talent in front of the recruiters and receive better job offers. The global recruitment app is called O’hire.”
O’boy. It ended with “For people who rely on the conventional job search procedures, O’hire is here to help those add a zing to their boring C.V/Resume.” Can we please stop trying to zing-up resumes? Recruiters don’t want zing. ATSs don’t want zang. And bots scouring the web for profiles don’t want to get zapped.
A few years back, I wrote a post entitled Let’s Stop Reinventing the Resume. I wrote “There’s a reason resumes are the way they are. They work. They work because they’ve become standardized. Recruiters know the format. Job seekers are taught early on this format. And if they aren’t, Google searches are there to show them how it’s done.”
Anyway, O’Hire, which appropriately launched on Friday the 13th last month, allows a job seeker to upload a two-minute long video resume to a portfolio. They can also add suitable skills, location, and type of job they want. A recruiter swipes right on candidates they like and left on ones they don’t, Tinder-style. If a recruiter likes a candidate’s video pitch, they can contact the candidate through Whatsapp, email, or call them.
Shubham Gupta, the company’s co-founder says, “We get thorough knowledge about a candidate’s aptitude, talent, skill sets, and attitude towards work with help of a resume or C.V. In many cases, it might not be possible to express all the strong areas through a resume portfolio. So, in order to express more effectively, a video resume comes in handy, It helps the recruiters know more about a candidate and hence make wiser decisions at the initial stages of the hiring process without wasting time and resources.”
Job seekers can upload videos 2 minutes in length on the O’Hire app.
O’God! Two minute videos? The typical resume is scanned less than 5 seconds before a recruiter determines whether or not it deserves to be put in the trash or not. There’s simply no practical use for a database of video resumes that are two minutes in length.
The company’s app download page says, “Recruiters can also leverage easy and comfortable hiring. Now simply relax and hire the most appropriate candidate without wasting time and resources. The new age job hunt platform, O’Hire helps you end up receiving opportunities from across different sectors.” Yeah, relax and watch two-minute video resumes all day. That’s what your recruiting career has been missing.
The good news is job seekers can also add things like location, a few skill tags and some experience, which employers can use to search candidates but that’s flawed for a few reasons. Which brings us to the job seeker side of the equation.
The site depicts two job seekers playing guitar (see image) and another jumping around in their video. They make it look like a major Hollywood production. Their explainer video doesn’t help either. The best-of-the-best candidates aren’t going to take the time to do these video resume, which means the only ones who are will be the most desperate, or the most un’hirable. According to its page on Google Play there have only been 100-500 download so far.
I won’t even get into the compliance issues, but this thing only has a chance to take off in countries not called the United States. There’s no pricing listed anywhere, and considering the product, I’m guessing it’s free for both job seekers and employers.
I won’t waste your time and my time beating up this dead horse any longer. I’ll just end with this: Video works well as an employer branding tool, an interviewing tool, and a pre-screening tool. It simply doesn’t work, and never will work, as a resume database. Just because you can make a video resume mobile app doesn’t mean you should.
