Accounts of Current
Practice
Video CV’S, A Student-Led Initiative
Tom Goodacre - [email protected]
Loughborough University
With competition in the graduate job market higher than ever, employers are increasingly turning
to technology to streamline their recruitment processes. The use of online testing and video
interviews allows employers to cut down candidate pools prior to face-to-face interviews. The same
technology, however, also presents an opportunity for students to help themselves to stand out
from the crowd and improve their own employment prospects.
It was this opportunity which our team was seeking to leverage in January 2014 when we received
a grant with the broad brief of improving the employability of Loughborough University Politics,
History and International Relations students. We were able to identify video CVs as a relatively
underused tool within the field of employability and began to experiment with the format ourselves.
It soon became apparent that the term ‘Video CV’ was something of a misnomer as the videos
more closely resemble covering letters than CVs. The term also places undue emphasis on the
finished product, as while video CVs are an excellent tool for those seeking entry into the creative
industries, for the most part, it was the process of making the videos which had the largest impact
on participants, as confidence grew and presentation skills improved across subsequent iterations.
We therefore developed a short structured workshop which functions as an interactive and
formative tool, helping to prepare participants for interviews and employment by developing their
employability skills through a process of reflective learning and positive reinforcement before they
enter the job market. The workshop itself begins by asking the participants to deliver a thirty second
‘elevator pitch’ to the rest of the group. This operates as an icebreaker and leads students to start
thinking about how they present themselves and what they have to offer. From here participants
are asked to consider what their ‘unique selling points’ are, and what, given a moment for reflection,
would they like potential employers to know about them which they would not get from a traditional
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