The Power of the First Impression

With so many people looking for jobs in today’s economy, the competition you are up against as a job seeker can seem quite daunting. After all, if an employer decides to toss your application out for one silly spelling mistake, it’s not really a loss to him/her. After all, there are probably at least 100 more resumes in the mountainous stack to go through. It’s very likely that there will be at least a handful of people with your same qualifications that don’t have any minute spelling mistakes on their resumes.

As this scenario illustrates, first impressions are extremely important in deciding if your resume gets a thorough read-through or not. But first impressions are also extremely important when it comes to the in-person interview as well. Although we may not be conscious of this, we make judgments about a person within a tenth of a second of meeting them (source: Forbes). Not only are these first impressions made quickly, but they last and have a significant influence in determining how we think about and remember people.

And this is what makes video resumes so powerful and important in your job search. When you create one, you are ensuring (as much as is possible) that what an employer first sees from you is something that you think adequately expresses you as a professional. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of making a bad first impression during a phone interview. Or the experience of not getting a call for an interview because of an inappropriate Facebook picture. Or even showing up to an interview and realizing that you forgot to lint roll your suit. These little things affect the quality of your first impression!

Luckily, when you create a video resume, however, you can reshoot, edit, and review the video resume as many times as you would like until you feel that it has achieved the goal. Then, when you walk into an interview, you can feel confident about having primed the employer with a good first impression, which will then set the context through which the employer perceives your interview.

It may seem like a miniscule aspect to a job seeker, but the first impression is actually quite powerful! To get started on your flawless (or as close as you can be to flawless) first impression, sign up for a free job seeker account on Jobma and get started with your video resume creation today!