Five Questions For The Minds Behind Guugos.com

We've all heard about video resumes. Some people think they are a useful tool; some say they're not worth the hype. A new startup from Chicago entrepreneurs Steven Brooks and Mark Henderson aims to create video "cover letters" to help jobseekers stand out from the pack. To learn what these folks are about, read on. And let us know your opinion on video components in a job application. What's the story behind the name? Steven Brooks - The word Guugos comes from Japanese. It ends up being translated to mean 'to collaborate.' I wanted to find a word that represented what we're trying to achieve, which is to put two people face to face, instead of communicating via text based email. So the word collaborate came to mind, and I looked through various dictionaries on the internet and I found guugos. Also you can get that word as a user ID just about anywhere. More after the jump - meanwhile, here's a sample Guugos video: Why is this needed? SB: Well the traditional process, if you're in college or maybe even have 10-15 years of experience, you may not have a network of friends or family where you can make half a dozen phone calls and, based on your relationships, get inside another company. Many larger companies build a moat around their company. The only way you can become aware of a job or apply for a job is to find the careers page on the website and submit a cover letter and resume. You hope and pray you get a call back. There's no way to follow up, because you don't know where [your application] went. That's a hard process to manage. What I've always been frustrated with is how to explain who I am and what makes me different in a cover letter. If I had five minutes to meet with you, I could explain it. I've never been comfortable with a piece of paper doing my talking for me. We'd like to get a candidate to think about themselves. We'd like that person to spend a couple minutes on camera talking about themselves. What are the things about you that people need to know, that when you talk about them, it makes you smile. We'll film them, we'll bring them to our studio. Mark's team will edit it down to a nice, tight, 60-90 second video package The individual candidate gets a hyperlink. They embed that on their resume, put it on their social networking profiles. It's our hope, and we've seen evidence of this, having a video makes [recruiters] more apt to look at the application. We're putting the humanity back in the process. But video resumes have been around for a while. SB: We're not doing the video resume. There's no point on putting the resume on video in my mind. We should be calling it more of a--its an introduction service. It's a chance to tell the person on the other side, "This is who I am. These are the kind of things I like. To give the employer a chance to look at them, listen to them speak and say, "I think this person will fit in my company's culture. Let's get them in for the first interview." You read 100 resumes, you read 100 cover letters, you haven't learned anything about any one of these people. We want to supplement the resume with a chance for the employer to listen to them for a few moments. Mark Henderson: You know that the one thing that video can do is to help someone make an emotional connection with a topic. There have been so called video resume services before, but we've all looked at them, and they're sort of hit or miss. "Well, my friend has a camera and he's going to sit there and point it at me." The picture quality can be good or bad, the lighting can be good or bad, there's so many factors kind of missing from it. If I'm looking at Joe Smith's video resume from a different service, if the camera is shaky and not on a tripod, or if he's fumbling a lot or if its too long, my thought is if he's putting this much effort, or not this much effort into the way he looks and sounds, what does that say about what he's going to do if he's coming to work for me? But some people just aren't good on camera. MH: I don't necessarily buy into that completely. Through my company (ed.: reallyreallybig.com) and through previous employers, I have done hundreds and hundreds of interviews. I'm trying to rack my brain to see if I've ever come across someone who's so bad at presenting themselves that we would not use what they had to say. Part of the Guugos process is prepping them to think about what they're going to say so they can do a good job. I work with them, we have a base set of questions that we start with and I always reserve a right to kind of go off script, and in a way, be a preview for an actual job interview. I've got the resume in front of me, the stat sheet, but I want to learn more about them as individuals. I'm interested in people. I want to learn their stories. HR pros may say they're not prepared to deal with video. You can't print it out or take notes on it. SB: Employers are using software to strip away all of the attributes of the person to just look at keywords. The cover letter is generally thrown in the garbage can. One of the tactics we recommend to our candidates is to put a hyperlink to your video on your resume, so the video travels. What our goal is, we're trying to give individuals an opportunity to differentiate themselves from all the other text based resumes and cover letters already submitted. We're not asking the video to be the key, but we want to be a portion of it. Yes, you can't annotate a video right now. We are trying to give employers one more piece of information they can't get right now. There are going to be reservations or objections, but when we spend time with those responsible for hiring good people, the dialogue says yes there is value in seeing this person speak. MH: If you're Microsoft, you probably would prefer to spend less money on airplane tickets to bring somebody in. If you could get a sort of preview, a coming attractions, I'm working with jobseekers in the studio to bring out the best of who they are. SB: Human resources and legal are still some of the oldest departments in businesses, and they still love paper. It's a comfort. They may get a resume electronically, but one of the first things they'll do is print it. They probably still have their fax machines hooked up. We know there will be technical reservations. We're not making this the only piece of information on the candidate. You started with 300 candidates. Now you have it down to 50. 10 have video cover letters. All we're trying to do is give them a head start in putting the humanity back in the process.

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Five Questions For The Minds Behind Guugos.com

Rachel Kaufman

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Rachel Kaufman