This is the year of online videos. With the success of YouTube and their contemporaries, many companies are looking for ways to enhance traditional services with moving images. The recently launched Gigged Up is a job site that is betting on the video phenomenon to change how employers and candidates interact.

Gigged Up allows employers to upload a video along with their job posting. Candidates will be able to get a more personal feel for the company that cannot be conveyed using text. They may also be more apt to view a video, especially if they are on the fence about whether they like a particular job posting.

On the flip side, candidates can also upload their own video for employers to watch. Gigged Up suggests that the video be treated like a first interview, and that the candidate should delineate their background information and goals.

Overall, Gigged Up is an interesting twist to the traditional job site, allowing candidates and employers to interact via online video. However, I am a bit skeptical that many candidates would trust themselves to put up a video interview.

Currently, I don’t see any real videos on the site. The only video is an example clip made by the people of Gigged Up, and the video itself is pretty bad quality. Even more foreboding is the clunky nature of their flash player. They should really consider using the same player as blip, which is simple and fast.

We should all check back when employers start uploading videos. It will be interesting to see if they make fresh and creative videos that draw candidates in more successfully than a plaintext job posting.

The TechCrunch 7 party was quite a blast–I met a bunch of people, all of who are doing interesting things online. During the course of the evening, I chatted with the founder of WageExchange. Their goal is to even the playing field in the job market by gathering salary information from employees around the US, and anonymously divulging the data for all to see.

There’s already many salary information sources online from survey companies. However, WageExchange is the only one that I know of that exposes the raw salary data. Other companies only provide aggregate data such as medians, averages, and standard deviations. Aggregate data is informative, but it also means that you’re at the mercy of how the companies decide to slice the data. With WageExchange, you can slice and dice however you want (as long as you have the skill to do so offline).

So what is the benefit of raw wage data? WaveExchange’s tag line is “it’s rude to ask, but you want to know.” A well-informed employee will have more bargaining power when it comes time for performance reviews. WageExchange’s founder shared a story with me about a group of accountants who collected all their pay stubs, and discovered that they were underpaid. They approached the board of directors with the pay stubs and statistics in tow, and got the raises they deserved. The directors just couldn’t argue with the hard numbers. This was the inspiration for WageExchange.

In order to get access to the wage data, you must first fill in a salary survey. It’s a pretty typical survey that asks for your job title, industry, salary, bonuses, working hours, and other relevant information. After finishing, you can leisurely peruse and search others’ salary information. The design of the interface won’t win any awards, but it’s functional and gets the job done.

Right now, there’s about 600 survey items that have been filled out. WageExchange is looking to expand, which will make their database that much more valuable. A feature that I would like to see is the ability to provide aggregate data alongside the raw data. Various drop down boxes would allow the user to slice the salary data along various dimensions like industry and job title. Also, the ability to export the data to a spreadsheet would be nice for us information addicts out there.

Overall, WageExchange’s goal is a noble one: helping employees discover their value in the market. Go fill out a survey, and see if you’re the one being underpaid.