My 16 year old daughter went for her first Broadway audition this past weekend. The audition was standard for the theater world…an open cattle call and over a thousand people waiting for their turn. And what did the audition entail? 16 bars of one song. That’s it…and then on to the next applicant. So in 16 bars an applicant needs to convey their ability to sing, act, move, and build rapport with an audience. 16 bars…that’s generally less than a minute. While corporate interviews aren’t that brief yet, the amount of time an applicant has to make an impression on a hiring manager is getting close to 16 bars. More and more hiring managers are reading resumes off of their Blackberries and finding potential talent in 140 characters or less on microblogging sites like Twitter. Resumes are being scanned and parsed and hiring authorities are Googling applicants to quickly discover what the page one results say about their brand. 16 bars is all anyone has time for anymore. What kind of song are you singing? By the way, my daughter made it past round one and is now on to the second phase of the audition process…reading a monologue…and you guessed it…she will have under a minute to do that as well!
