6 Pros and Cons of Video Resumes

6. Con: Video resumes offer a chance of discrimination

As we reported earlier in the year, discrimination is still an unfortunate factor in the hiring landscape. A video resume can be a prime example of it.

One short video potentially reveals a lot of private information about you, including your age, sex, race, ethnicity, disability, and appearance. Hiring Managers can discriminate based on any or all of these things.

While most of us would prefer to not work for companies like that, it’s a lot trickier when it comes to unconscious bias. The Hiring Manager may not be aware that they’re discriminating on these things.

(For a more complete discussion on discrimination in the workforce, please see our article here)

For the long and short of it — sending a video resume early on in the recruitment process means you will be letting your age, sex, race, ethnicity, disability, appearance, and/or other factors affect their first impression of you.

Conversely, sticking only with a text resume means these things won’t come into play until after they’ve started moving towards a decision.

There are no easy answers on this point, but it does present the biggest challenge to the video resume.

Even if video resumes don’t give exhaustive career overviews and don’t show writing skills, they would still be an excellent complement to your text resume as a kind of second cover letter.

But if the video resume actually makes it harder for you to find a job because of discriminatory factors outside your control, then there’s no reason to use it at all.

The thing that actually happened

The video resume was supposed to be the candidate’s move — your idea, your production, sent to stand out. It never took hold.

What took hold was the opposite. Asynchronous video interviewing — the employer records the questions, you record the answers alone, into a webcam, on their schedule — became ordinary practice. Writing in The Conversation in December 2023, Angelo Capuano noted that HireVue’s tool, which uses AI to automate interviews, was already being used by more than a hundred employers including Telstra.

So video did enter hiring. Not as something you choose in order to be seen, but as something you are required to do in order to be screened. Every objection in the section above still applies — it still puts your age, your accent and your appearance in front of the decision before your record gets there — except that now you cannot decline it and keep the application.

The reason it is spreading is that text stopped working. When any candidate can produce a fluent application in seconds, the written application stops separating people. The Australian HR Institute reported in September 2025 that Robert Walters found more than half of ANZ jobseekers now apply for twenty or more roles at a time, and quoted Austin Rulfs of Zanda Wealth describing a single junior analyst role that drew 420 applications in 72 hours — around 60 per cent of them reading as AI-templated. Gartner’s forecast in the same piece is that by 2028 one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake.

Faced with that, employers reach for whatever is harder to generate. Right now that is a face, answering an unseen question, on a clock. Video screening is not spreading because anyone thinks it is a better assessment. It is spreading because the written application stopped carrying information.

Which produces the joke at the centre of all this: the same technology that made text applications worthless is now being sold back to employers to score the videos that replaced them.

The other change is that the equipment stopped being an obstacle. When the video resume was first predicted, making one meant a camcorder or a webcam, a cable, editing software, and an upload that took longer than the recording. Apple did not put 4K video in an iPhone until the 6s, announced in September 2015. Australia had no 5G network at all until Telstra switched one on in May 2019. A candidate in 2007 could not casually produce a broadcast-quality video — and neither could the several hundred other people applying for the same job.

That is what changed, and it changed in the employer’s favour rather than yours. A one-way video interview only works as a mass screening tool if every applicant already owns the studio. Now every applicant does, which is precisely what makes it possible to require rather than merely invite.

One thing changes in your favour, and shortly. From 10 December 2026, Australian entities that use personal information in automated decision-making capable of affecting your rights or interests must say so in their privacy policy, including the kinds of information used and the kinds of decisions made. It does not stop the practice. It does mean that from December, if you want to know whether a machine is scoring your interview, the answer should be published.