Abstract : Today’s society is characterized by digital and multimodal technologies which allow the constant emergence of new digital genres, especially in professional contexts. One of these recent genres, the video resume (VR), is perceived as an innovative recruitment and selection tool attracting growing interest in business settings. However, very little research focuses on the definition of the VR as a genre and its multimodal nature in order to validate it as a professional digital genre. Therefore, the aim of this paper is twofold: a) to determine the multimodal rhetorical structure of the VR, and b) to assess the role multimodality plays in this digital genre. The dataset used for the analysis consists of 26 VRs, all of them in English, taken from the online platform YouTube. The methodological procedure is based on a moveand-step rhetorical analysis followed by a multimodal discourse analysis (MDA). The results show that in VRs meaning is conveyed through the interconnection of various modes (embodied, disembodied and filmic) and that the multimodal rhetorical functions identified in the analysis contributed significantly to the definition of the VR as a professional digital genre. Pedagogical implications are also presented, which demonstrate the potential of the VR as a teaching resource used in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) to enhance business students’ multimodal skills and to improve the communicative competence much needed in today’s business world.
