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Comment by passtheglass | Hacker News Reader

I really hope this doesn't catch on, I hate the idea of the social mediafication of resumes.

Not that I support tiktok, but I feel the opposite. Resumes aren't really that useful for determining whether or not you'd want to work with that person. A short video is a lot better at that, before moving to something more detailed like a resume. How we handle resumes in general is just very outdated and archaic.

Videos introduce bias towards young, attractive candidates and bias away from shy people or those without a lot of confidence or experience talking at a camera. Which makes peoples' objections understandable.

However, there are a lot of jobs for which being young, confident, and attractive are pretty valuable skills. So I'm sure that it will enjoy fairly wide adoption.

I fully agree with you, but I think a missing piece is that the resumé-oriented system has biases as well. Writing resumés and cover letters is a skill that many people don't have. There are mountains of jobs for which resumé-writing ability is a needless barrier that's not very useful (or common), and a video app is likely a _less_ biased filter.

I used to work at a co building a chatbot to filter candidates for low-skill hiring (restuarant, retail, etc). These hiring processes are sometimes little more than 1) do you meet a basic list of requirements and 2) are you "okay" -- ie not going to be slovenly, violent, rude to customers, dumb, etc. Step 1 is trivial enough that we automated it away, and step 2 is crucial enough that we _always_ scheduled an interview once a candidate was qualified. The same bias exists towards young, energetic, and socially-savvy people, but 1) it seems unavoidable, given how expansive and inaeticulable the goals of the interview are and 2) it's fairly relevant to many of the jobs, particularly customer-facing ones.

Funnily enough, we actually had a feature requested by a couple of companies to make candidates upload videos, for exactly the reasons I described above. This is the niche that Tiktok is trying to operationalize. While going through videos is slow and expensive, going through interviews is much more so.

> Videos introduce bias towards young, attractive candidates and bias away from shy people or those without a lot of confidence or experience talking at a camera.

Regarding young candidates: it's specifically targeted at Gen-Z.

Regarding attractiveness, confidence and experience talking/acting in front of a camera: there are a lot of jobs where that's important.

I doubt the intention is to hire senior engineers via tiktok.

Yea, I think a lot of the criticism being posted here on HN is because this would be, at best useless, at worst counter-productive, for hiring software engineers in particular. But there may be other careers where a short video would be helpful. So I'd be willing to give the idea the benefit of the doubt.

Just please don't use it to try to hire me in tech! I have enough disadvantages, I don't need my monstrous looks and obvious signs of old age to put me at a greater disadvantage. Written resume for me, thankyouverymuch. At least a written resume helps you get your foot into the door before the onsite interview happens and looks-based biases start making their way in.

"young, attractive candidates and bias away from shy people or those without a lot of confidence or experience talking"

Is this not exactly the same for regular interviews today? Ageism is a huge problem. People who lack confidence won't do as well, etc.

Most people have an online profile, so what's preventing the interviewer/hiring personnel from just looking them up online?

> Most people have an online profile, so what's preventing the interviewer/hiring personnel from just looking them up online?

Citations needed. What % of currently alive humans have an 'online' profile, how are you measuring that statistic? Are they engaging actively? How many have never had a smartphone, how many do not use social media at all?

Without sources and actual numbers it's hard to take your point seriously. MOST people do this on Hackernews, claiming "most" or "everyone" or "the majority of..." without actual data to back that up.

I've never bothered to look up pictures of candidates online. I read through the resumes on greenhouse can click proceed or reject. Eventually I see them, but not until the actual interview.

But you were probably not hiring for roles were being attractive, friendly, used to being in front of a camera and (possibly) extroverted were important, right?

What about the racial bias this creates where people get judged on their looks or race as the filtering for deciding who comes to the interview?

It sounds like a bad idea.

If it were a “down to earth” video that’s fine but TikTok culture encourages polished, professionally-lit quirky and provocative performances while being sexy and dressed like a LA yoga hipster. I assume that will carry over to this video resume culture which IMO will be kind of a disaster. I want to hire capable people not quirky sexy hipsters with on-camera TikTok skills.

What makes you think hiring managers will suddenly prioritize "quirky sexy hipsters" if those traits aren't desirable for the role? You seem to be assuming users on the hiring side will use it the same way the average TikTok user browses through average TikTok content

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