FAIL
Talk about a long shot of desperation.
London charity UK Youth has launched a new initiative to help get young folk into work – by encouraging them to post video CVs on Twitter. The charity has teamed up with social media app Videofyme to let jobseekers record a video of themselves to upload to the microblogging site alongside the hashtag #employme, which employers …
If you have 85 CVs for one job and they all send in a video lasting 4 minutes no employer in the world is going to waste 5 hours and 40 minutes watching them. Plus you can't sift videos like you can paper, or satisfactorily screw them up and throw them in the bin and you have to watch cringe inducing acting. All courtesy of the social media "I'm special" generation.
I'd read the CV first to see if it is even worth watching the video. The video would probably help me not waste my time getting some of the candidates in to interview. We get a lot of people who I don't really like the look of the CV for one reason or another but their skills match, would give some of them a second chance to impress. All in all it could work out very well.
Corporate HR don't even read CV's anymore, they just let the computer spit out the minimum number of candidates that meet fairness regulations (if applicable), they sure as hell aren't going to watch video CV's unless it is to mock it on one of the many shady HR industry sites where they hang out.
Maybe they should put them on YouTube and use the comments section there for determining if a candidate is suitable. (That's a joke).
'London Charity UK Youth'
Ugh...why don't they try some real charity work, like actually helping people, instead of these ineffectual, 'yoof style' initiatives that do fuck all. Did they come up with this idea while pissed out of their nuts in a Shoreditch cocktail bar on a Friday afternoon? Money well spent!!!
"With youth unemployment standing at around a million young people and up to 70 graduates chasing every job, it is more important than ever before to be heard above the crowd"
Problem: lots of completely unskilled boys and girls with unrealistic expectations trying to find work in the real world after spending a 3-year holiday at a Mickey Mouse holiday campuniversity.
Solution: retrain for a proper job which might be needed, such as nurse, computer programmer, cook, car mechanic, plumber, roofer, electrician, joiner, decoratorpost amusing videos on youtube and make a clown of yourself.
And don't forget that we need donations in order to continue helping you. Your £20 per month (direct debit) will help us develop intuitive, creative and ground-breaking ideas to get British youth into the labour market.
You hit the nail on the head, train in something useful instead of wasting time on 'look at me, look at me' videos.
I watched the video with my recruitment hat on and to be honest didn't see anything that would warm me to the guy. He could have done that video in a better way.
I've had probably 15-20 job interviews. Been turned down three times perhaps because the job requirements did not actually match the advertisement.
Also been on the employing end too. Never had more than 5 or so applicants interviewing for a job and perhaps one in 20 was actually out of work. We've had openings unfilled for a few months at a time.
Pretty much all the people worth anything have jobs.
... does not imply that graduates outnumber jobs 70:1, although I'm guessing that's the shock factor they're going for. In the extreme case, with 70 suitable jobs, and 70 suitable applicants, each applicant applies for all 70 jobs, and there's no problem at all.
If they weren't just attention seeking, a figure representing the ratio of graduates to appropriate opportunities would be a much more useful measurement of the problem. And if you provided figures broken down by specialism, that would be a seriously worthwhile thing to do. Unlike this, which is not just a pathetic waste of time and money but a retrograde step in that it can only serve to encourage various forms of discrimination.
And the "numbers of applicants per job" is probably also over-inflated by the JobCentre rules that you have to apply for N jobs per week or lose your benefit. So out of those 70 applicans the probably a significant proportion may be from people who are only apply to "show willing" until the sort of job that they are really interested in comes up at which point they apply seriously and are joined by ~70 other applicants many of whom may only be applying to keep their benefit.