Slippery when wet

There’s an interesting new online recruitment tool called wetjello that just launched in beta and is scheduled for it’s official launch in May. The site design and technology implementation look first rate.

wetjello is video blog meets job board. Video blog as in vBlog or vlog. If you think wetjello is niche, then how about the vblog called Helmet cam central, which features videos from snowboarding and video enthusiasts Chad and Ryan Lancour (as an aside they developed the vblog plugin that power our video’s on EXCELER8ion).

On wetjello, candidates post short video snippets of themselves highlighting their career assets, or video resume, as a means to rise above the noise to reach employers and recruiters alike. Employers on the other hand get to feature videos of their company, their jobs and otherwise leverage the benefits that only video can offer. Namely, full motion sight and sound and its amazing power to communicate complex ideas and emotions and connect with an audience (something that TV advertisers and more recently interactive video advertisers know full well).

Interesting idea me thinks. It would seem to immediately appeal to the MTV and MySpace generation who are already showing a strong fascination with videos and blogging in general. I wonder how popular it would be with anyone else besides Gen Y’ers? Forget age, I just don’t know how comfortable we are yet in front of a video camera for purposes other than the family vacation? Would we all be squirming in the hot seat, under the baking lights from our Sony Handycams, fighting our intrinsic desire to wave and make silly faces at the camera in the middle of our video resume?

I noticed that wetjello (I can’t wait to hear the inspiration for this name) is using a hot up and comer from the interactive video platform space called Brightcove to power their site. Brightcove’s technology is certainly leading-edge so we should expect a good user experience when using the video section of the slippery job site.

It would appear that wetjello is looking to build a proprietary community and platform, just as the job boards have done. That’s certainly a great start since they’re in the ‘build it and they will come’ mode right now, but I would think that their long term success would be better if they also host an open community that accepts candidate and employer videos from other sources (like individual/company web sites, blogs and vblogs). This would harness the power of the network effect on the web, as well as tap into the long tail that self-publishing has brought about. Assuming that wetjello can build an audience large enough to be useful, this would seem like their primary defense against an online job board like Monster from simply copying their idea and adding a new tab on their platform for video resumes. Otherwise I just don’t see there being a big barrier to entry for the major boards to take have their cake and eat wet Jell-O too. That was bad.

Of course, maybe the founders of wetjello are just looking to build and flip their business to one of the big boards? I’d love to see wetjello leverage their first mover advantage by building an open MySpace for job seekers/recruiters, vs. a more controlled model (aka friendster or CareerBuilder).