Prevview seeks to make employ-tainment popular

One job applicant belted out a self-written song asking employers to hire him; another trotted out her qualifications while impersonating a man — deep male voice and beard inclusive.

Granted, not all applicants are that vivacious, but for prospective employers, visumes are surely more entertaining than pouring through dozens upon dozens of text résumés, who may not spend more than a few seconds on each one.

Prevview, a website that bills itself “Asia’s first interactive video job portal”, is trying to add an extra dimension to the job-hunting process. Job-seekers have to register with their website, apply their creative juices into making visume magic, and upload it. And they’re ready to start reaching out to potential employers, at no charge.

What if they’re an absolute ditz at video-making? Prevview takes care of that by offering professional visume-making services at different price points, from as low as $50 (if they bring a friend), to as high $500, which allows them to be the Steven Spielberg of their own award-winning visume (not as well-equipped, of course).

The question then is whether Prevview is an absolute ghost town where a job-seeker’s visume ends up unappreciated and ignored.

I checked their job portal, which looks pretty happening. There’s quite a number of vacancies on the search page, not quite the volume of established sites like jobsdb.com.sg, but not too shabby either — at 122 jobs within a month, and 37 listed employing companies.

To spice things up, they recently held a visume submission competition called “Visume Wars”, with prizes like iPad 2s and digital cameras up for grabs, as well as seven different job positions.

The company, brainchild of CEO and founder Ryan Wong, was started in December 2010. His inspiration came out of a problem a friend faced while trying to cultivate a Bee Farm in Uganda: Beekeepers had to either travel over long distances to get to him for a job interview, or he had to go out to them.

Besides the obvious novelty value, Ryan believes that visumes actually help hirers save time and cost and gain efficiency. Instead of relying on phone screens and first interviews to weed out weirdos, a submitted visume enables employers to capture an applicant’s personality, qualifications, skills, at experience — all at one go.

So far, visumes have not quite become mainstream in Singapore yet. The US, on the other hand, has at least four job portals which accept visumes: Vault.com, HireVue.com, Rezbuzz.com and Videoresume.com. But if sites like Prevview explodes, more job applicants in Singapore would have to fret about how they look in front of a camera.

Moving forward, Prevview hopes to launch a video conferencing function on their website soon, which allows remote interviewing. They also have plans for mobile apps that allow registered users to upload videos to the website through their smartphones.