How To Stand Out In A Sea Of Resumes

It's a jungle out there: Competition among job hunters is tougher than ever. But some ingenious men and women are making themselves candidates of a different stripe by creating video resumes that let them display the wit and flair usually missing from the standard version.

Most of the video resumes are homemade and rough-around-the-edges. But there are companies springing up that will help job-hunters shoot and produce slickly polished pieces.

Careerbuilder.com announced recently that it will offer a video resume service. At jobster.com, you can post your video resume on your profile page — and it may be featured on the site's homepage.

Stan Paprzycki is a sales manager who got a job right out of college and stayed with the same company for 14 years. But when his firm was recently sold, Paprzycki found himself looking for a job.

"There's a sea of resumes out in these Web sites [like Monster.com] and I wanted to do something that would make my resume stand out," he told CBS News science and technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg. "I thought to myself, 'if I really want to get through to that person, the best way to do it is for them to actually get a flavor of who I am.'"

Paprzycki's wife, Caryne, captured his spiel on their digital camera; his sister pitched in and did the editing. He posted it on the video-sharing Web site youtube.com and e-mailed the URL to potential employers.

"I thought to myself: 'Wow, this is a great idea. It's almost like we invented the Post-It note,'" Caryne told Sieberg.

The end result was "almost 100 percent" positive feedback and a job offer in Long Island, N.Y., outside New York City.

Trent Willis, a political consultant, also decided to take a chance on a video resume. He was ready to leave his home state of Alabama and break into the big time in Washington. But he knew it wouldn't be easy.

After watching dozens of attack ads, he decided to make his own, with a fun spin on it. The opening screen of his vide resume says, "Trent Willis: Wrong for Unemployment."

Bill Wilson, who runs a political consulting firm in Washington D.C. received more than 50 paper resumes and just one on videotape — Trent's. It was enough to get Willis a ticket to Washington for an in-person interview.

"I don't think you can communicate creativity and attitude through a resume," Wilson told Sieberg. "And that's what I got from that video clip — an attitude. It was exactly what we were looking for."

Willis got the job.

Of course, a fun, flippant attitude won't work for every candidate. Sieberg warns that "you have to think about what you put out there. For Stan, he was going into sales, so it was OK to show personality.

"You want to tailor what you're going to put in your interview with the job you're applying for. Don't go too crazy if it's a straightlaced position. Also, keep it to two or three minutes."

And one final piece of advice from Sieberg: "Think about it, because it could live online for a while."