Hotmail co-founder wants to help people find jobs through TikTok-like video resume platform ‘ShowReel’

• Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia has launched a new social video messaging platform.
• It’s called ‘ShowReel’ and it helps people create video resumes that can be sent out to job recruiters.
• ShowReel plans on onboarding companies who can directly choose candidates from this platform.

Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith created one of the first free web-based email services ‘Hotmail’ back in 1996. It was acquired by Microsoft just a year later and then rebranded to Windows Live Hotmail and Outlook. Fast forward to 2021, Bhatia is now launching ShowReel, a TikTok-like social video messaging platform for people to help find jobs.

So how exactly does the app work? ShowReel lets you create video resumes of yourself but in a conversational way. There are preset questions to which you answer, record videos and stitch them together. These questions have been selected as those that are mostly asked in interviews. ShowReel also has a TikTok-like feed where you can browse through and watch videos of other users. You can share these videos with companies you wish to work with and can also add a QR code to your resume that links directly to your ShowReel video.

“You, first of all, create a profile of your own. So let’s say you want to market yourself - one way is you send a paper resume to different job sites or to different companies directly. And it gets lost and you may be called for an interview or not. Or you can be more proactive and put a QR code in every one of your paper resumes or send an actual video. You actually send a video and say this is who I am,” Sabeer Bhatia explained in an interview with Business Insider.

How companies can find candidates on ShowReel

ShowReel currently only has questions designed by Bhatia for four categories - professional, personal, startup and leadership. The company is in talks with global companies to get them onboard the platform and prepare their own set of questions for job seekers. Bhatia wouldn’t name these companies but we can expect to see them join the platform by the end of this year.

“There will be a job section where you will be able to specifically look for jobs and do actual interviews for that job. There will be job-specific questions that are asked for that job. Companies will either post questions on that section directly themselves or they’ll ask us to post them and you just answer those questions and you’ve done your video interview with that company for that job,” Bhatia said.

How job seekers can stand out with videos

ShowReel wants to act as the first step towards finding a job and wants to offer a unique approach in addition to the process of sharing your resume with companies. It’s also designed to help speed up the interviewing process. Bhatia also expects this to help job seekers make their profiles stand out.


“At the end of the day if the person who’s hiring, if they take a look and they have ten resumes only one of them initially has a QR code with a video, who do you think that person is going to hire,” he said.

Video profiles or resumes may actually work really well, and they can even make a person stand out from the crowd. But for a company scanning through the videos first, it may create biases. On this, Bhatia said that the platform blends more with people facing jobs like retail, sales and business development. There are also features being developed for people who may not like to make videos.

“We will help them create an avatar where they don’t have to even show their face and they can just do an audio recording for example,” Bhatia said.

Revenue models

In addition to helping companies speed up the process of interviews, ShowReel is also exploring options of shortlisting candidates for companies. “We’ll charge some money to reduce the number and give you only the hundred best of the thousand best using AI.”

This is also expected to turn into a revenue model for ShowReel where it charges companies for posting jobs on the platform. But end-users and job seekers will never be charged for using the app, Bhatia assured.

ShowReel is currently in beta, and the app is available to download on Android and iOS. The reason behind holding the app launch in India is because “the problem is most acute over here” and “you solve the problem where it is the worst first.” Bhatia also suggests that this app will give Indians an opportunity to market themselves, something that is quite common in the United States.

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