Enterprising young job seekers have tried various means to attract the attention of potential employers. Some advertised their portfolio pages and personal websites for relevant keywords and even for particular brand and key executive names, so that their job application would show up alongside organic results on Google.

Recently, an innovative PR executive took things one step further, potentially changing the age-old system forever.

Graeme Anthony was on the lookout for a new jobwhen he changed his residence from Manchester to London. He created a video, using his skills and talents and then uploaded the video on YouTube. The video not only contained an introduction to himself, but also contained sections such as ‘Skills’, ‘Portfolio’ and ‘Contact’. Viewers could decide which section to view first.

Apart from being live and interactive, rather than a dull representation on paper, the video is also interspersed with a healthy doze of humour, which could rarely have come across well on a CV document.

The video, which was uploaded last September, has certainly got a lot of attention. It received 2,000 views within the first hour of being uploaded. Anthony’s Twitter account was also mentioned a number of times with comments regarding the video.

More importantly, the video also drew the attention of potential employers, some of whom even commented on their corporate blogs, calling it “the best job application ever.”

On his part, Graeme says, “It brings me to life in a completely new way. It shows off my personality in a way a paper CV can’t. It’s got the wow factor.”

Recently, Frank PR, an agency based in London, saw the video and after interviewing him, gave him the job.

In an email to Search Engine Journal editors, Matt Cutts said, “The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site. Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.”

Sites affected by this update included Forbes, the Washington Post, Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal, all of whose PR fell to 4, SF Gate and Sun Times whose PR has fallen to 5 and TechCrunch and Engadget whose PR was reported to have fallen to 5 but is now back to 7.

Changes in the PageRank do not seem to have affected traffic to any of these sites though. This may change over time if Google decides to punish the sites for selling links. However, for now it seems that the PageRank update was only meant to remove their ability to sell high PR links by simply dropping that number.