ISB, Hyderabad, Main campus

Starting the coming admission season, applicants to the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad and Mohali will have to submit video resumes to the admission committee apart from the GMAT scores, essays and recommendation letters.

Currently, the first step for candidates who wish to apply to the institute’s Post Graduate Program in Management (PGP) is to fill an online application available on the school’s website. For those applying to the class of 2014, the additional thing that will need to be attached to this form would be a 90-second video recording of them answering a question about their life goals.

The video resume would need to be uploaded in either .mpeg, .mpg or .wmv formats. V Srinath, senior manager, Admissions at ISB told PaGaLGuY, “We have narrowed down the subject of the video resume to the statement ‘Life for me is…’. Candidates have the freedom to complete this statement in whatever fashion they find most appropriate and comfortable on the video.”

Srinath said that applicants could express their short term goals, or a vision for the future and the possible challenges they envision themselves facing in order to achieve their targets.

Through the video resumes, the schools wants to check the communication skills and articulation abilities. The videos would be used as an additional parameter for screening applicants who would be granted an interview, said Srinath.

Interestingly, candidates who have been applying to ISB’s Young Leaders Programme have been required to submit video resumes since the beginning of the scheme. Here’s a video resume of a YLP candidate that we found on Youtube.

Funnily, the webpage where the video resume has to be uploaded says that it requires Internet Explorer 7 or above only for proper functioning, the browser which is exclusively used by the world for downloading Google Chrome or Firefox. Besides, there is no easy way to create videos in MPG or WMV formats on an Apple Mac. Considering that ISB’s primary applicant constituency is techies, it would help the institute to upgrade their video resume upload webpage to a version that is more 2012.

In its defence, the school says that YLP candidates have never had trouble uploading resumes. Still, the admission team is geared up to deal with any problems that come their way.

Besides ISB, the Gurgaon-based School of Inspired Leadership (SOIL) has been asking candidates for video resumes since 2011. The Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Ghaziabad had experimented with video interviews in 2011, but the idea had bombed due to technical and usability mishaps and was discontinued.