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I challenge you to find a more approriate time than now to focus on marketing yourself. The slow economy will mean increasing competition amongst job seekers in 2009, and everyone will be looking for an edge. As I reflect on how I might be able to assist the job seeking world, I turned to my own bag of tricks and I found one tool that’s missing. The video resume. We’ve discussed video resumes before on this blog. Some people think they’re a great idea and others find them irrelevant. I think that the power of video brought on by the advent of cheap digital image capture and fast Internet distribution is undeniable. Even the mighty Google tweaks its Universal Search algorithm to promote video content. So, when you are looking to build your personal brand, no less when you need to find a job pronto, I’m going to bet that having a web video on your side could be a huge asset.

I would also guess that the vast majority of the job seeking world has yet to consider doing a video resume, especially if you aren’t in the YouTube generation. If you are like me, the thought of putting together a video about yourself comes with all sorts of questions, not the least of which is “won’t I look like a total idiot?”. Well, I’m going to take one for the team here. If my boss can get on stage and sing, then certainly I can chronicle the process of creating a video resume.

A DIY Video Resume

Over the coming weeks I’ll go through the video resume building process in depth. I have a ton of questions as I’m sure you do too. I’m going to use this post to document all the burning questions I have so far, and then I’m going to use further posts in the series to explore those questions and get some answers. Sure, I can just Google a bunch of advice and spit back some links for you, but that has no credibility. I need to try this - experience this process and show you what it takes. The end result will be my video resume for all of you to critique. Oh, and this is for all you DIY’ers. There are professionals out there to help you do this, but I want to know what it takes to do it yourself.

Initial Questions About Video Resumes

Right now I’ll have to admit, I’m pretty intimidated. Like many of you, I have a paper resume and some limited experience shooting home videos of my kids. I don’t even have a decent webcam. There are some basics I need to understand before I even get started:

• What kind of camera should I use?
• What should the background be?
• What kind of clothes should I wear?
• What should I say?
• How long should the video be?
• How can I get good sound?
• Should there be titling, music, flaming logos?
• What should I use to edit the video?
• How should the video be edited?
• Where should I host the video when I’m done with it?

Ulterior Motives

No. I’m not actively seeking a job. I see this as a great opportunity to add some video content to the blog, and for me professionally to learn some new tricks. I know that how-to content is some of the most sticky there is. So, I’m hopeful that this series becomes a useful tool to help thousands of job seekers get out of the paper world and into the video world. If the series sucks, or I’m not cut out for video I’m sure you’ll let me know about that too. Stay tuned.

Tags: how-to, video resume

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