It's time for video resumes

Two young Indian-American entrepreneurs are attempting to make the traditional paper resume a thing of the past by connecting the job seeker and the employer through video resumes.

The Palo Alto Mayor, Yiaway Yeh, and several other top corporate leaders of the city - which is known as the heart of the Silicon Valley -- lined up last Thursday in its downtown to inaugurate the new office of GetHired.Com, which currently has just 14 employees.

Less than three weeks ago, on January 30, the duo Suki Shah and Naresh Patel announced having raised $1.75 million in an oversubscribed round of seed funding for their GetHired. Com; which is said to be the most comprehensive video-based social recruiting platform and job board.

Shah argues that GetHired.com is the first job board to embed video capabilities directly into its social recruiting platform so that job seekers can record and submit personal, dynamic responses to an employer's most pressing pre-screening questions at the start of the hiring process.

As a result, employers are able to quickly find top candidates with good communication skills who are a culturally fit for their organisation, he notes.

"Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, businesses in Palo Alto have always been at the forefront of innovation when facing today's most challenging problems," Yeh said.

"It is exciting that a local company has reinvented how employers and job seekers connect in today's digital world," he added.

"Palo Alto is an incubator of leading growth companies," said Suki Shah, co-founder and CEO at GetHired. com. "We're honoured to launch in the same office that Intuit started out in - and in the same town that Facebook, Google, Sun Microsystems and PayPal got their start.

These companies have been game-changers in their respective industries, and I am confident that GetHired. com will make a significant mark, as well," he said.

A serial entrepreneur who co-founded his first company in 2008, Shah, 28, explained that open positions on job boards like Monster.com or Craigslist is time-consuming and expensive - and may elicit hundreds of email inquiries per post.

Employers must then spend time sifting through these resumes to find the best candidates, sometimes with no insight into who is really best for an open position, he observed.