There’s no denying that 2026 is a bleak time to get hired, especially for young people. The US job market has seen a sharp slowdown in new vacancies since last month, and open jobs are down compared to last quarter in the UK too. Perhaps hardest hit are new graduates, struggling to gain work experience as AI and tough economic conditions are causing entry level jobs to disappear; the UN estimates that as many as 800 million young people face a future without jobs. A quick scan of the 1.5 million strong Reddit community aptly named ‘ recruiting hell ’ tells a clear story: hiring is broken.

For young jobseekers who grew up fluent in content creation and social media, the paper resume is a relic of the past. It can be limiting to express their professional ambitions and experience in an authentic, compelling way on a single page. What’s more, applicant tracking systems (ATS) are increasingly auto-rejecting resumes before a human recruiter even sees them, and hiring managers are becoming more mistrustful of AI job applications from candidates.

Entrepreneurs Lamees Butt and Suzanne Bannister are on a mission to fix recruitment, for both jobseekers and employers. As founders of RISER, a video hiring app built to kill the traditional resume, they have one goal: to put trust back into a hiring process that’s fundamentally human, but has had humans stripped out by decades of automation. I spoke with them to understand how they’re using video resumes to help young jobseekers get hired, and at the same time, support employers to find qualified, high quality candidates to fill their open roles.

Why The Traditional Resume Deserves To Be Disrupted

For my parents’ generation, it was completely normal to take your paper resume to solicit work from businesses, unannounced. Even as a millennial, I would take copies of my printed resume to in-person job interviews in the pre-Covid era. But now that technology has moved the hiring process so far along, why are we still expecting one written, neatly formatted page to encapsulate the entirety of our goals, previous career experiences, and breadth of skills?

“The resume was originally just a list of skills to help employers see if you had what a role needed. Then technology came to keyword-match resumes to job descriptions, so people started hacking their resumes. AI has made that worse,” Bannister told me.

“Since the AI boom, a ‘perfect’ resume and cover letter are table stakes,” Butt said. “If every resume looks flawless, how do you tell candidates apart? That problem has been made worse by an entire industry of advice on how to hack the ATS, so hiring managers are now flooded with thousands of near-identical applications, only to get to interview and realize the person doesn’t match who they thought they were hiring,” she explained.

“To fix this, we didn’t want to bolt AI onto the old system or build another AI recruiter. We wanted to recode hiring for human discovery, and figure out what actually helps people make good hiring decisions,” Butt said.

Instead of doubling down on optimizing resumes for formatting or keyword-stuffing, Butt and Bannister built RISER to use video as a different way to build trust early in the hiring process. Similar to Tinder but for recruitment, RISER matches jobseekers with potential employers. Both talent and hirers upload a short video, and the ‘Verified Gut Feel’ model analyzes them and offers recommendation matches based on compatibility, character and behavior, not keywords.

“At the end of the day, hiring is still a human decision,” career coach Aimee Young told me. “A resume tells an employer what you’ve done; a video shows them who you are, and gives a real feel for your personality, your energy, how you communicate and whether you’d fit their team, which no bullet point can do,” she said.

Are Video Applications The New Resume?

In an age when personal branding is pervasive and content creation is at an all time high, it’s not a question of whether videos are a substitute for resumes to help jobseekers get hired – it’s already happening.

Former jobseeker Emma Greenwood was recently on the news , sharing her frustrations with her job search. “I’d done all the right things, gone to a good university, got work experience, but I kept getting filtered out before I even got started. I was feeling pretty defeated, and it was having a noticeable impact on my mental health,” she told me.

After applying for more than a hundred jobs and internships with no luck, Greenwood tried RISER for a fresh approach and made a 60-second elevator pitch about herself for prospective hiring managers. “Using video to apply for jobs made me feel like I could be more authentic. It gave me a way to convey my personality, passions and enthusiasm in a way I’d never felt able to with my resume,” she said. “It helped bring basic human connection back into the process; it no longer felt like a draining, one-way process, and instead a constructive conversation about where I’d actually work well.”

After matching with recipe box company Mindful Chef, Greenwood credits her short video for eventually getting hired as a community and events executive. “The video made me feel empowered in the job hunt and made it easier to genuinely connect with and explore opportunities, and to understand what did and didn’t work, so I could improve my pitch,” she said.

The Benefits of Video Applications For Employers

In addition to benefitting jobseekers, video is an effective alternative to traditional resumes for employers too.

Mary Rochester Gearing, chief marketing officer at Mindful Chef, told me that using RISER to screen candidates for their open roles “definitely improved hiring outcomes,” and ultimately led to a successful match with Greenwood. “Adding video into the process gave us something we simply don’t get from a traditional resume: an early sense of the person behind the application and an insight into their enthusiasm, thought process and motivations.”

Rochester Gearing also noted the passion that comes through from candidates on video: “When someone makes the effort to show you that they genuinely care about the role, that can tell you something which a resume optimized for keywords cannot.”

And she’s not alone. I also spoke with Duncan Mackie, international head of Amazon ads brand innovation lab, whose team used RISER to recruit senior, middle management and junior roles. “The thing that struck me immediately was the genuine excitement from hiring managers to actually hear from someone, rather than just reading a document about them,” he told me. “In our world, so much of what makes someone great in a role comes down to energy, communication and how they think on their feet. A resume just can’t capture that.”

For Mackie, there were additional benefits to using a video-first approach to vet and evaluate candidates. “The quality of shortlists improved because we were making better informed decisions earlier. It genuinely sped things up and reduced the number of interview rounds needed to get to a strong candidate,” he said.

According to Bannister, RISER sees a published video result in a match in 6 minutes, and a match goes to an offer in under 2 weeks, on average. So with proof that video applications are not only a viable, but a preferred hiring method for both employers and candidates, could traditional resumes become a thing of the past?

“There’s a lot of focus right now on youth unemployment, and that gives us hope that businesses will be pushed to rethink how they hire in this new era of work,” said Butt. “We’re on a mission to transform 5 million careers by 2030, and to be the trust layer that gives people genuine access to opportunity.”