CHICAGO — Video is clearly growing in importance as a tool in recruitment, but it’s been pretty slow to take off. I’ve always wondered why it hasn’t been growing much faster.

Two theories, both pretty plausible IMHO, at the OnRec conference:

— Kjetil J. Olsen, director of business development at European recruitment site StepStone.de, noted that audio is an important component of watching video online. And since most job-searching online happens not at home but at work — (imagine that!) — no job-seeker wants to be sitting at a computer in the office looking at videos of companies he or she might want to join. (Makes sense to me.)

— And several people pointed out that scanning a text resume takes merely a second or two, or a fraction of that if it’s done by an automated filtering device or applicant tracking system. Just waiting for a video resume to download and open takes longer than that, even if you’ve got a fast broadband connection. It may not matter if you’re looking at three or four candidates, but when you’re screening dozens or hundreds a day, that time demand becomes overwhelming.

In some industries, like television news and theater, video resumes are obviously a remarkably important screening tool for hiring, and have changed the way job-seekers are viewed. (When I was in television news, there was always a stack of hundreds of video tapes from prospective job-seekers in every news director’s office. Most of them unviewed. And if you think it takes a while to watch video resumes online, imagine how much time it took to put one into the machine, wait for it to start running, watch as much (or as little) as you want, take it out, and start over.)

Even with the challenges, everyone I spoke to agreed: Video is coming. And it’ll be critical in a few years. Two video production companies were at the conference — one offering professionally edited interview videos shot at exhibitor booths for just $500.