Huge ditches the cover letter in favor of video

Slave over wording no more. Dumbo mega-agency Huge is abolishing the cover letter in all its job applications. Now the company just wants you to record a video explaining who you are and why you want to work there.

“Let’s make this quick,” the company writes as the new header for its Careers page.

“Cover letters suck, so record a short video to tell us what you’re great at and what you care about instead. Or skip straight to the form below and we’ll figure out where you fit best,” Huge writes.

Come work with us at Huge. Just don't send us a cover letter. https://t.co/WtkWyWE4i4 pic.twitter.com/uplF9SR2rj

— Huge (@hugeinc) December 12, 2017

You still need to upload a resume on the site, and mark down what division in the company you’d like to work in and what cities you’re up for, but that’s it. It’s really simple.

According to Brittany Slattery, Huge’s new VP of comms, the firm thought it was leaving talent on the table with traditional cover letters, writing in an email to Technical.ly that the “process of applying for a job at any company is pretty broken right now and is actually inhibiting to allowing agencies to find the best talent.”

She added that the approach will help the company target diversity in its hiring.

“[The new] approach increases our ability to hire diverse candidates and those of non-traditional backgrounds,” Slattery wrote. “Often times the intangibles that do not show up on paper — like personality, energy, and drive — all come forward on video, allowing us to avoid missing promising candidates we would otherwise overlook from a pure resume perspective.”

We’re curious how this affects Huge’s hiring. Will it mean more applications because creating a video is easier than writing a letter? Will it mean they’ll be able to review applications faster, because watching a video is easier than reading a letter? It could also be a competitive advantage in hiring. Will it mean they hire better people, because they’ll be have the benefit of all seeing all the nonverbal cues that companies who only read a slavishly edited letter will miss out on? All of those seem possible!

If you’re not familiar, Huge does creative work for the world’s biggest brands, including Google, Hulu, NBC Universal, Nike, etc. The company is based in Dumbo but has 14 offices across four continents. According to LinkedIn, Huge employs more than 1,000 workers.