Your resume has to be information heavy for online portals, I will explain why in a minute. When I say heavy, I don’t mean your hobbies, “strengths” and “truthful” declarations. Heavy as in details like your projects, your technical pet projects etc. You are going to add your final year project and technical projects you are passionate about in a very detailed way, with lots of technical keywords and buzzwords relating to the kind of jobs you are looking for. When you add these kind of details, Naukri will favor your resume over other resumes which are low on this required information.
Before we go further, it is time for you to realize how these job portals work and what it means to the recruiter looking for candidates and what it means for you.
I doubt if any of the freshers grasp the mechanism at play here. Let’s take a little tour of how this all works. Let us consider the process of filling a job position from the recruiter’s POV(point of view), shall we?
Naukri is Google of resumes
Let that thought sink in.
A little background on algorithms and AI(Artificial Intelligence). If you are a CS fresher you should already be aware of it and hopefully using this knowledge to your advantage.
Google’s algorithm is like a brain, that reads websites and categorizes them into different groups like fitness, news, naughty, entertainment, sports etc. Once you type in a keyword and hit search, Google reads its database of websites, returns the best matches relevant to your query. If you search for weight loss, it won’t return a single website about programming, construction, puppies or other unrelated sites. How does it do that? It reads the content of the websites on the internet and groups them based on the keywords in the articles. It can differentiate between the coffee Java and the programming language Java by looking at other related keywords in the article.
Job portals, ecommerce sites (when you search for products on for e.g, FlipKart) around the world use similar algorithms to return meaningful results to its user. If the recruiter looks for a .NET developer it won’t return
resumes that don’t have keywords like .NET etc. But it will return all the resumes that have .NET in it. A resume rich with this keyword will likely rank better than other resumes which are less optimized. I say likely because, it depends on how the Naukri developers have designed the algorithm and what kind of scoring system they have used to rank the resumes that meet the search criteria.
There are millions and millions of websites on the internet. Say there are 10,000 (an arbitrary number) websites on Formula One racing. You are new to Formula One racing and want to learn more about it. What do you do? You go to www.google.com and search for “formula one racing”. You get results and Google says that there are “1,35,00,000” results (at the time of this writing). Now my question to you is, are you going to look at all the “1,35,00,000” results? Of course not!
You will probably pick the first three websites and read them up. I bet you won’t go past the 2nd page results.
Let us apply the same logic. Naukri boasts it has “39.5 million” resumes in its database at the time of this writing.
Let us assume you are a fresher, a Mechanical Engineer in Bangalore and we will assume there are 10,000 (it is a reasonable number) Mechanical
Engineering fresher resumes active on Naukri. Now the recruiter wants to fill the open position for an entry level (fresher) Mechanical Engineer. She may use search terms like ‘mechanical engineer’, ‘solidworks’ and other related keywords. Now since there are 10,000 freshers, Naukri will return all these results. Now the question is, where is your resume ranked in these results. Is it on the first page of the results page, 2nd page, or last page?
As mentioned earlier Naukri, TimesJobs etc use similar technology like Google to return the best and relevant results to the recruiter. Now if your resume had all the keywords related to Mechanical Engineering, you have good chances of ranking higher than the rest of the fresher resumes. But if you don’t have enough keywords related to this, you are screwed; your resume will be collecting e-dust somewhere in the end. Depending on how bad it is, it could very well rank over 5000!
To make it worse, the recruiter will NOT download all 10,000 resumes and go through them. She may download the first few hundred, go through them, shortlist the ones she likes. Call these candidates and schedule the interview. If no one gets hired, she may go through a batch of another hundred and very soon she will find the one that will eventually get hired and rob you off your chance of getting the interview and possibly the job.
Your only goal with the Naukri resume is to have really good information relevant to your degree and the type of jobs you are targeting that will make its algorithm happy and favor your resume over others. By doing this, you can rank in the first few pages depending how well you have created the profile and increase your chances of the getting interview calls!
Exercise: Please take a look at your resume and check if you have enough keywords related to your degree or your targeted job titles. If you remove your education section, can a person tell by looking at your resume your field/expertise or what kind of jobs you are targeting?
If a human being cannot tell, do you think an algorithm can tell? We don’t know how sophisticated the algorithms are, used by the portals. So it is a good idea to add all the relevant details and keywords to make it easy for the algorithms to find this information. And match it with the recruiter’s search criteria.
I will walk you through an example.
The web development team at Acme Inc., wants a fresher ASP.NET web developer with 0 years experience to join the team to help with the work load. The manager makes an official request to the HR to create a position for his team. He also provides the details like the job title, job description, responsibilities, and skills needed for this position.
The HR department assigns this task to one of the recruiters Pooja. Now Pooja wouldn’t know much about .NET, ASP.NET, etc. unless she has filled positions with similar skill set in the past. Let us assume she is new to this technology and skill-set.
Job Title: ASP.NET developer
Experience: 0 years
Description: Will be coding in C#, Debug existing code, Unit testing, UI testing
Skills: Mandatory
- Excellent knowledge of C#
- NET framework 4.5
- Excellent of knowledge of ASP.NET UI controls
- Working knowledge of version control like Team Foundation Server Should know HTML, jQuery, JavaScript
- Good OOPS and MVC concepts
- Team player, ability to meet deadlines, work on different projects, work without supervision
Preferred but not mandatory:
- Creating Custom ASP.NET controls HTTP Handlers
- Fiddler
- Knowledge of nunit Visual Studio 2013 Knockout and Angular
If you are not a CS graduate you might be seeing stars looking at these skills. Now my question is, do you think the recruiter Pooja knows or understands any of this? Of course not!
She takes the job description and starts typing the keywords like C#, ASP.NET, JavaScript, jQuery, TFS Visual Studio in different combinations into the search fields of portals like Naukri, TimesJobs etc and also she puts in zero years of experience. As a side note some employers may use only Naukri or TimesJobs etc. The best option is to create profiles in all the portals.
Once she hits the search button, Naukri will show a results page something similar to Google when you are searching for something.
After Pooja has hit the ‘Search’ button, Naukri will go through its huge resume database picking resumes based on the given search criteria. It will look for resumes that contain keywords like ‘C#’, ‘ASP.NET’, ‘Visual Studio’ etc and also it will make sure these resumes belong to candidates that have zero years of experience!
It will not return resumes that don’t have some combination of the above keywords and whose experience is greater than zero years!
Once it collects all the resumes that meet the above criteria, it will rank and order the resumes based on a weighted scale. It will determine which resume has all or most of the keywords and how often they are repeated. The resumes that don’t have all the keywords or enough density will be ranked lower. In other words they get pushed to later pages like 2nd page, or 10th or the last page! It all depends on how the resume is written and how it compares to the other resumes. Lastly it also depends on how the algorithm was designed, developed and optimized for ranking and scoring the selected resumes by the developers at Naukri, TimesJobs etc.
Now consider your own resume, does it have all the keywords that the recruiter might use to search for viable candidates for the type of job you are looking for? If you were a ASP.NET developer, do you have the above keywords mentioned in your resume, if so how well have they been used? And how often?
If you haven’t used the keywords effectively, now you know why you may not be receiving the interview calls from job portals.
The best thing you can do is write a keyword-dense resume that is relevant to your targeted job.
I hope you now have a better idea of how the job portals work and the mindset of the recruiters.
And the game doesn’t end there. It has to be visually appealing to grab the recruiter’s attention and force her to go through your resume. Make sure your resume has content she will like and make her call you for an interview.
Next chapter I will walk you through the exercise of creating the resume for portals the right way.
I break down the process and details on how to go about it. I hope you understand the candidate searching process at play here and realize what needs to be done.
Next Lesson : Resume Break Down
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