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“Calling all recruiters!” Makena Yee, 21, a college student in Seattle, yelled into her camera in a recent TikTok video. “These are the reasons why you should hire me!”

Ms. Yee continued to summarize her qualifications. “I’m confident, I like to be organized, I’m fit and I’m a team player,” he said as images of the companies he worked for flashed on the green screen behind him.

The 60-second video quickly garnered more than 182,000 views and hundreds of comments. Users tagged potential employers. “Hire someone herrrr!” one commenter begged. Ms. Yee said she received more than 15 job postings that she plans to pursue after a summer internship.

In modern job searches, regular one-page resumes increasingly follow the way of the fax machine. This can be accelerated by an app known for its viral lip-syncing and dance videos that popularized the TikTok resume.

As more college students and recent graduates use TikTok to network and find jobs, the company has a program allowing people to apply for jobs directly. And employers, many face labor shortage, they are interested. Chipotle, Target, Alo Yoga, Sweetgreen and more than three dozen companies have started recruiting people through the app.

The TikTok resume is at the center of these efforts. Job applicants post videos via the hashtag #TikTokResumes and TikTokresumes.com to show off their skills, like an old personal essay. They include contact information and LinkedIn profiles if they wish. Employers review videos that should be public and schedule interviews with the candidates they find most interesting.

Kayla Dixon, head of marketing at TikTok, which developed the program, said resumes are an effort to help young people “take the bag” and get paid.

It’s also an extension of TikTok’s section called Kariyertok, where people share job search advice, resume tips, and job opportunities. Videos with the hashtag #edutokcareer have garnered more than 1.2 billion views since TikTok was introduced in the United States in 2018.

But video resumes have also raised concerns. The format removes some level of anonymity, allowing employers to potentially fire candidates based on how someone looks or acts. Much of the networking on TikTok also depends on collecting views, which can be difficult for those who aren’t adept at creating content or are struggling to get it. even distribution in the application feed.

TikTok isn’t the first social platform companies are trying to use for recruiting. LinkedIn, the professional networking site owned by Microsoft, is heavily used by both job seekers and recruiters. Taco Bell in 2015 advertised internship opportunities On Snapchat and at McDonald’s in 2017 allow people to apply for jobs Via a Snapchat tool known as “Snaplications”. Same year, Facebook started allowing companies post job postings on their pages and communicate with applicants via Facebook Messenger.

TikTok now takes it even further with video apps instead of swiping up to a more traditional app page. While TikTok resumes are available to people of all ages, the best videos posted via the hashtag belong to Generation Z users, many of whom are in college. The app said it sent TikTok resumes from more than 800 applicants last week.

“Recruiting people or recruiting via video feels like a natural evolution of where we are in a society,” said Karyn Spencer, global head of marketing at Whalar, an influencer company that recently hired an employee from TikTok. “We all communicate more and more through video and photos, but a lot of the resumes our recruiters get feel like 1985.”

Kalli Roberts, 23, a student at Brigham Young University in Utah, said the 2001 movie “Legally Blonde” inspired her TikTok resume. he recreated famous practice video Elle Woods, the main character played by Reese Witherspoon, has been offered to attend Harvard Law School.

“Please consider this my official Elle Woods style video app,” Ms. Roberts wrote. His TikTok has gone viral and he is now interning at TikTok’s global business department.

“I didn’t feel like my personality or who I really was, it caught on my paper résumé,” Ms. Roberts said. Noting that TikTok allows him to showcase skills like video editing and public speaking, which could be line items in a written app, he said, “There were 10 other companies besides TikTok, ‘If they don’t want you, we do it.'”

Sherveen Mashayekhi, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said many recruiters are moving beyond standard practices online or through networking sites like LinkedIn. Free agent, a startup focused on recruiting in the tech industry.

“The cover letters are unreadable and the resumes are not predictive, so alternative formats are necessary,” he said. “It won’t be just video in the next five to 10 years. There will be other considerations, such as games, for the first phase of the hiring process.”

Some companies have said that TikTok resumes are a useful way to evaluate candidates for public roles. Tressie Lieberman, the chain’s vice president of digital marketing, said Chipotle has so far submitted more than 100 job openings to the app to recruit restaurant team members.

“We do real food in our restaurants,” he said. “We’re excited to see people’s cooking skills, whether it’s grilling chicken, knife skills, or making guacamole at home and bringing those skills to the restaurant.”

Paul Levesque, WWE’s vice president of global talent strategy and development and better known as wrestler Triple H, said World Wrestling Entertainment also uses TikTok for recruitment. He said video resumes give a better idea of ​​the applicant’s personality. It is something the company values.

“For us, it’s a bit different than a normal office position where you look at someone’s background,” he said. “We are really looking for charisma.”

Shopify, an e-commerce platform, said it started turning to TikTok to find engineers.

“There are smart entrepreneurial technical people everywhere,” said Farhan Thawar, Shopify’s vice president of engineering. “If you can’t explain a technical topic to a 5-year-old, we probably have something you don’t understand about the topic. So having a medium like TikTok is perfect.”

Other employers have raised questions about relying on virality to determine if a candidate is worthwhile. Adore Me, a lingerie company, started to try With recruiting via TikTok in January. Chloé Chanudet, Adore Me’s chief marketing officer, said she’s worried about who gets the most distribution on the air.

“Women of plus size or color are much more likely to have their videos not aired or reviewed for several days,” he said. “We have the same concern that TikTok resumes may be biased from the algorithm.”

TikTok said it “does not moderate content based on shape, size, or ability.”

Some Gen Z job hunters said they weren’t deterred. Christian Medina, 24, an aspiring product manager who graduated from college last year, said he has received six job postings since he posted a TikTok video last month seeking a product management role.

“Getting a job for a recent graduate is nearly impossible, and LinkedIn hasn’t been very helpful for me,” he said. “I will definitely continue to use TikTok resumes.”