The global financial crisis is now having an obvious impact on every walk of life. Unemployment in 30 of the world’s wealthiest countries is expected to rise by some 8 million people in the next two years as the severest recession since the 1980s takes hold, according to an Economic Outlook report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This translates into 42 million unemployed in OECD countries in 2010.

As vacancies continue to evaporate, competition for any job available will become fiercer. After the Christmas holiday, there surely will be a range of intense competition for vacant positions. Want to improve the efficiency of hunting a job? Want more companies get your profile? Here resumes play an important role in the first place.

Except traditional resumes, video resumes have now become one of the hottest new ways to showcase candidacy for a wide range of jobs. This is all due to the quick development of Internet. As a result of it, increasing number of people turn to Internet for old problems. Creating a resume video on YouTube might be the next wave in human resource acquisitions.

A video resume is just a way for job seekers to showcase their abilities beyond the capabilities of a traditional paper resume. The video resume allows prospective employers to see, hear and get a feel for how the applicant presents themselves.

As it how to create a professional video resume, you will get some tips in the following paragraphs. Instead of just using a camera to prepare for a video resume, here I would like to introduce a more perfect way. That is, do it with PowerPoint. Then upload the PowerPoint (in video format) to websites.

Here is a main benefit of doing so: Besides the video you created with your camera, you can also insert some other contents into your video resume with PowerPoint, such as texts (your written statements), pictures (photos of the awards you won), animations and other online videos. This could help show you more comprehensively.

Below are some respects you should pay attention to while capturing the video with camera:

Ø  Dress properly just as if you were going to an in-person interview

Ø  Eyes looking at the camera, don’t look around

Ø  Don’t speak too fast

Ø  Make sure there is no background noise

Ø  Discuss why you would be a good employee and what you can do for the company once you were hired

Ø  Focus on your professional endeavors, not your personal ones

Ø  The video should not be too long

Ø  If the video is not perfect, start over

Respects you should pay attention to when preparing the PowerPoint:

Ø  Use template effectively, since it is for your resume, business or simple style would be better

Ø  Present your topic by using key phrases

Ø  Limit the number of slides, too many slides would make prospective employers tired to view

Ø  Embedding suitable photos and charts could add variety

Ø  Make the Text’s color and background’s color contrastive

Ø  Make sure the voice of the video you captured is loud enough

After you finish creating your resume with PowerPoint, the next step is to convert the PowerPoint to video format so that you can upload the PowerPoint to websites. Here are two ways for you to do this:

1.       Use some professional conversion tool to help you do this. When searching in Google, you will get lots of advises. When it comes to ease of use, a nice feature set and pure speed of solution, this tool: Acoolsoft PPT2Video Converter becomes a good choice. It is designed to help users convert PowerPoint to almost all popular video formats for easily uploaded to websites.

2.       Use Camtasia – a screen video capture program. First save your PPT file in PPS format and set Camtasia studio to record the whole screen. Play your PowerPoint PPS file and Press F9 to start recording the screen. When you reach your last blank slide, Press F10 to stop the recording. After that, you will be prompted to save the captured slideshow, choose a directory and enter a filename for it. Finally, save your capture in AVI format.

Besides uploading your video resume to your own web site, blog and YouTube, there are also some other professional career networking sites, such as MyWorkster, CareerBuilder and Jobster.  They all have a section of your profile where you can include video. It would be convenient for employers to view it. Also, you can include a link of your video resume in your paper/online resume to promote it.

Here is a YouTube video made with PowerPoint which introduces several great examples of resume objectives, summaries and profiles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3Lp8Ts27bM. Take a look and hope it would help you prepare a better resume.

In the new year, may everyone have a good job and a happy time.

Image taken on 2009-04-16 09:57:34. Image Source. (Used with permission)