Video résumés have long tickled imaginations in Hollywood without making much of a dent in the real world. Enter Aleksey Vayner. The Yale student submitted his video résumé, titled Impossible Is Nothing, to investment bank UBS last fall. It became a YouTube classic, while its karate-chopping, tennis-acing, deep-thought-having star became the joke of Wall Street. But another funny thing happened: Vayner’s vanity creation awakened recruiters and job seekers to the possibilities of marrying the video CV to the Internet–and that may just revolutionize the job-search process as we know it. So who will be the YouTube of video résumés? Jobster, an online job board, is teaming up with social-networking site Facebook to launch a career site featuring video résumés in March. Vault.com another job board, concluded its first video-résumé contest last week, its prize a shot at an investment-banking job. Smaller players 62ndview, HireVue and Resumevideo are all launching widely this spring. Workplace bloggers speculate that YouTube plans to start its own video-résumé channel, although the company is noncommittal. Says Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster: “I can see a day when video as part of the résumé is the norm.” Job seekers aren’t waiting. On YouTube, there are already 1,590 entries listed under résumé. Not all are what you would call serious . The best ones, though, are smart, colorful and effective. Benjamin Hampton, a recent graduate of Washington State University in Pullman, posted a 5 1/2-min. video on YouTube last fall, thinking it would be something different to send to employers.
