According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the unemployment rate in Latin America reached 7.8% in 2023, meaning that more than 28.7 million people are unemployed this year, not to mention the unemployed population of working age.
In Latin America, in addition to the unemployment caused by the pandemic, 54% of workers are involved in informal economic activities. This makes the situation more unstable and vulnerable in the region.
The problem remains the same: times of economic recession, with recovery in a few countries, but also a labor market with offers, but with difficulties to connect with the right human talent, with tools and procedures that do not fully satisfy the needs of both employers and candidates.
Current Job Boards
Job boards are systems that allow employers and workers to find job offers and demands. This is a scheme that connects options, needs, and solutions. However, both employing companies and the immense mass of people looking for work fail to establish effective connections and cover their expectations.
For example, according to the Newspaper “El País”, 8 out of 10 companies express difficulty in finding the right talent. Why is this? Let’s see:
- Lack of updates and automation: there is a partial absence of mechanisms to update and validate candidate and vacancy information. This leads to obsolescence, redundancy, and ambiguity. On the other hand, the presentation of the merits of the candidates usually requires physical or telematics procedures that imply a high administrative burden for both parties.
- Traditional methods, longer evaluation time: reading hundreds of CVs, then filtering them and then organizing personal interviews, requires a high investment of time and resources. The traditional method of recruitment is proving ineffective in producing the desired outcomes. That is: we are talking about a long and expensive process that in the end does not guarantee the best decisions.
- Difficulties in attracting and retaining young talent: there is a generation of digital natives with great potential, but at the same time, there is the difficulty of connecting with them, capturing their attention, loyalty, and retaining them in companies.
In this scenario, companies looking to hire staff face a double challenge: on the one hand, managing a large volume of applications, and on the other, selecting the best talents that fit their needs and organizational cultures.
How to optimize the recruitment and hiring process without implying excess time and resources, but at the same time improving the quality of decisions?
The Problem with Written CVs
The written CV is the classic way to get to know the candidates in the first stage. However, this format increasingly complicates decision-making in companies that not only look for hard skills but need to know what exists beyond the written words on paper.
For 21st-century companies, pressured by innovation and the need to increase or maintain performance, it is crucial to know what the person is like before hiring them. In other words: modern organizations need to know who you are and how you are, even before knowing what you know or what you do. What good is it to hire someone with 10 academic degrees if, for example, they don’t know how to work in a team or their emotional intelligence is poor?
The main problem with written resumes is that they do not faithfully reflect these qualities. Generally, CVs are full of irrelevant, false, or exaggerated data that do not add value to the company or the candidate. How to evaluate in this format emotional skills, attitude, presence, communication, enthusiasm, or the first impression of the candidates? Isn’t this important for the future performance and efficiency of the worker?
In practical terms, the written CV is not an efficient or attractive format for companies that receive hundreds or thousands of applications for each vacancy. Reading and evaluating each written CV implies an investment of time and resources that often does not translate into satisfactory results. Additionally, this tool does not capture the attention or interest of recruiters, who get bored and tired of always seeing the same thing.
Video CV: Multimedia Information at the Service of Recruiters to Evaluate Candidates
For our CEO and founder of CazVid, Yuvi Shmul, a video resume represents the ideal option for employers who need not only to simplify processes but to make better decisions. “Enhancing the evaluation of candidates in the first stage of the selection process, without costs and long and complex procedures, is CazVid’s proposal. Video resumes change the rules in recruitment,” he says.
This would not have been possible 10 or 20 years ago. It was even unimaginable 50 years ago. Video CVs burst into the Latin American job market because we live in a more visual world that is projected digitally, because the technologies that support these premises already exist.
“Imagine that you can preliminarily get to know your candidates, see them, listen to them, assess their attitude, body language, technical vocabulary, self-confidence, and even mastery of other languages, in a video between 30 seconds to a minute. Then, imagine that you quickly select your finalists, those who inspire trust, and that you will only read the resumes of these finalists. How much time would you save? Your decisions will be better informed because you first valued what really interests you from that group of people,” explains Shmul.
The video CV offers several advantages for both candidates and companies looking to hire staff:
- Stand out from the rest of the applicants, showing originality and added value.
- Demonstrate communication competencies, creativity, and mastery of new technologies, aspects highly valued in today’s job market.
- Project personality, attitude, and motivations, generating greater empathy and trust in front of recruiters.
- Visualize and showcase achievements, projects, and work, incorporating multimedia elements that support their resume.
And, on the other hand, the video CV as a selection tool allows companies to:
- Save time and resources: you can see and evaluate the candidates’ profiles quickly, without having to read extensive documents.
- Improve the quality of decisions: obtain more complete, truthful, and relevant information from the candidates.
- Increase interest and satisfaction: we are talking about more attractive, varied, and personalized applications.
CazVid: A Change in Paradigm and Focus
CazVid is a free mobile application, with its respective web version, which allows employers and candidates to connect by posting job offers and resumes in video format. We could say that it combines elements of TikTok and Tinder, dedicated to the job market, and that it seeks to facilitate the recruitment and hiring process for all types of trades and professions in Latin America.
The service, completely free, represents a change in paradigm and focus in the current job market because it bets on the video CV as a powerful tool for selecting staff, compared to most digital job exchanges that use traditional methods and tools to capture and select human talent.
“CazVid is based on the premise that the video CV is more efficient, attractive, and informative than the written resume, and that it allows employers and candidates to get to know each other better and optimize their decisions,” concludes the CEO of CazVid.
The brand not only includes the App for mobile devices and a desktop version, but also Agency Leads, a service that brings together powerful lead generation and management tools for recruiters and staffing agencies.
