Hiring Managers only spend 7 seconds looking at a resume. That’s a huge barrier to overcome for candidates without a college degree or traditional experience. So we created the 7-Second Resume. It’s a tool that allows young adults to inform Hiring Managers about the real skills, life experiences, and unique value that they can bring to the workplace. All in 7 seconds. It shows their motivation, ambition and perseverance—the exact types of skills that these Hiring Managers are looking for.

We created more than ads. We created a process for young adults to connect with Hiring Managers like never before. We interviewed young adults, helped craft their 7-Second Resumes, and put them in front of a camera to capture their story on video. The 7-Second videos showed their motivation, ambition, perseverance—skills that transcend a resume. The videos gave them a platform to tell their stories, and targeted Hiring Managers online and in broadcast. We also took the formula to career fairs, where we filmed, edited, and uploaded 7-Second Resumes in real-time, allowing Hiring Managers to find candidates immediately. This campaign changed 3 media channels: 1) LinkedIn, serving many individual videos to a specific audience, 2) Events, turning career fairs across the country into 7-Second film sets so Hiring Managers could find candidates on-site, and 3) Broadcast, telling one-to-one stories to a mass audience. This all happened within 12 months.

-Each 7-Second Resume was viewed an average of 344 times.

-Combined with the full campaign, site visits to GradsofLife.org increased by 74%.

-Grads of Life was contacted by an average of 45 businesses a month, up from the pre-campaign average of 2.

-The campaign was featured in Forbes and Fast Company.

-A global company integrated the 7-Second Resume into their recruiting/screening process. They have received 1,200 submissions in just 1 month of testing this, and are already starting to see how it is changing the way they assess candidates.

-The 7-Second Resume even caught the eye of LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner, who created his own video resume.