TikTok Is Expanding Into Job Recruitment — What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

TikTok — a social media platform finest identified for its sober, tutorial exploration of the heady subject matter often tackled by its consumer base — is at the moment rolling out plans to ascertain itself as a presence within the job recruitment house.

Surely Gen Z will use this as a second to conduct itself with decorum and maturity, and never as a possibility to troll Fortune 500 corporations.

According to a brand new website sponsoring the endeavor, generally known as TikTok Resumes, the app now permits customers within the U.S. to use for entry, affiliate and senior degree positions by tagging movies their movies utilizing the hashtag #TikTokResumes. The initiative is a part of a pilot program that at the moment has about three dozen corporations taking part, together with Target and Chipotle, in addition to choose media corporations, together with Meredith Corporation, ATTN and PopSugar.

While the pilot initiative’s intentions appear honorable sufficient — the corporate needs to assist “support our community members who are looking for job opportunities” by “encouraging our users to turn their traditional paper resume into a digital video resume or elevator pitch,” per its web site — the (short-term) foray into job recruitment appears to have sufficient awkward velocity bumps embedded in it to no less than give some potential candidates pause.

On the TikTok Resumes web site, for instance, the platform specifies that, sure, video resumes will have to be public to ensure that taking part corporations to view them — including a sophisticated and doubtlessly embarrassing wrinkle for anybody who’s both on the lookout for work with out the information of their present employer or just not a complete exhibitionist.

G/O Media could get a fee

TikTok additionally notes that the hiring system just isn’t uniform among the many taking part corporations, which means that will probably be doubtlessly tough for potential hires to trace the place their purposes are throughout the hiring pipeline or if their resume has even been acquired or considered in any respect.

A spokesperson for TikTok instructed Engadget that the corporate “… believes there’s an opportunity to bring more value to people’s experience with TikTok by enhancing the utility of the platform as a channel for recruitment.” And whereas it’s true that most of the platform’s Gen Z consumer base is at the moment combating a scarcity of employment alternatives — significantly given the devastating international pandemic we’re nonetheless military crawling our approach out of — maybe its appreciable attain and affect could be higher served boosting causes and campaigns its customers care about.

Interested candidates may have till July thirty first to submit their video resumes for the primary spherical of jobs posted to the platform.