Ferrari Of Resumes
Resume, the ticket to your first interview, getting your foot in the door. Before I start I must tell you, many freshers have emailed me their resume for a review. They all stink, honestly; they are all the same copy-paste resumes. The same poor structure, spelling mistakes and boring hobbies etc. It looks like all the colleges hand out the same resume template with the degree upon graduation throughout India. And the freshers just change the name, degree and college.
If you are guilty of doing the above by using someone else’s resume, you got to change it ASAP. Or you won’t stand out from the crowd and that is going to be a problem in many ways.
Before I start talking about re-writing the resume, I want to highlight the 2 roles the resume plays in job search and during the interview.
Role #1: Job search/Online portal
The resume you upload to job portals like Naukri, TimesJobs etc., should be highly optimized and keyword rich. Keyword rich as in including technical buzzwords/keywords generously related to the type of job you are looking for. LASER targeted resumes will fetch you better results. For e.g., if you are looking for a front-end developer position make sure you add technical skills like JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, HTML 5, JSON, knockout.js, etc. You should add the relevant keywords in the technical section and also in your projects if it is applicable. More on this later.
This is where freshers are failing badly and clueless as to why they are not receiving any interview calls. Without a well written resume, recruiters will never find your resume among millions of other resumes. And because of that you will never get a call from them, even if you have all the skills they are looking for!
An informative, keyword rich resume is vital to increase the number of interviews you book. Make sure you pay close attention to all the details I talk about and follow it closely.
Role #2: Interview
You should always carry a customized resume to the interview specifically targeting the job opening in question. Read the sentence again, at least 5
times. The reason you want to customize is it will give you an opportunity to talk about your skills and projects you are working on that relate to the job opening. This will be your secret weapon to impress and give you an opportunity to talk to the panel about your skills. Basically include content on the resume that you can talk about when they ask you to talk about yourself. I teach you how to do that in the coming chapters.
Alright now that we understand the roles of your resume, we can get started to craft a resume that actually does its job.
I know I know, writing resumes especially a good one is lot of hard work and boring. More boring than your parent’s well-meaning millionth lecture on how you should have studied better and not ignored their warnings during your childhood! Blah blah blah.
But fear not, I have a good system to come up with effective resumes and you can do it too, by it. As a bonus you also have access to my favorite resume template that has served me well over the years!
Let’s get started!
Next Chapter : Sexify The Resume
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