Aesthetics and presentation seems to be a lost art in our country. That explains why most of our students struggle to find jobs after completing college. The company I work for needed to fill a few positions and had posted these opportunities on a Job Site. Over the last few days I have been receiving resumes from prospective hires of varied vintages. Occassionaly an opportunity for software engineering students to do their semester projects arise, the lucky ones get wind of it and I have been receiving resumes from students trying to impress the hell out of us to secure a place. The problem however is that I am unable to figure out who's applying for what? because the resumes all look alike. YES, unless you read it thoroughly and get to the end you'll not be able to judge who got the expertise.
Every resume should and does start with an objective. So here is one that as arcane as possible .
An Engineering graduate with MBA, desires of pursuing a challenging career in innovative e-business where application of knowledge, skill and creativity is looked for.
The resume is then followed by a set of technical skills usually written like this
Makes life difficult for the interviewer and the prospective hire, more so for the latter because there is no way anybody can figure out the level of the candidate's expertise. During discussions the person asking the questions usually starts with, what in his opinion, is an imaginary mid -point in the technical expertise spectrum and tries to place the prospective hire appropriately and score him/her. Very often questions are asked and there is no answer. The discussion ends up being a one way street of interrogation. After several swings on the specturm the prospective hire manages to blurt a few answers. But at the end the number of unanswered questions will be a lot more than those that were answered. So what could have turned out to be a pleasant experience turned out to be hostile and bitter and the prospective hire feeling that he's been singled out for the onslaught, the interviewer blaming the state of education or the screening process. Pity.
There is a way out though? The least people can do is write their resume in a way that others understand. Its not enough if only they understand it. Detail technical skills, dont be abstract. We are not doing software design here. Don't just write Oracle 9i say what exactly it is that you know - Is it that you wrote just SQL statements or do you know joins, stored procedures, or worked with java on the database. Dont write J2EE - Write Servlets, JSP, Session Bean, Entity Bean and so on. Gives the necessary weight to your resume and paradoxically it moves up and receives all the attention. Here is an example of a good resume.
Every resume should and does start with an objective. So here is one that as arcane as possible .
Lead a career to enhance my skills and to create innovative strategies to flourish in the field of information technology to grow with the organization in good spirits.
Here is another one that beats meAn Engineering graduate with MBA, desires of pursuing a challenging career in innovative e-business where application of knowledge, skill and creativity is looked for.
The resume is then followed by a set of technical skills usually written like this
- Programming Languages
- Database
- Front End Tools
- Design Tools
Makes life difficult for the interviewer and the prospective hire, more so for the latter because there is no way anybody can figure out the level of the candidate's expertise. During discussions the person asking the questions usually starts with, what in his opinion, is an imaginary mid -point in the technical expertise spectrum and tries to place the prospective hire appropriately and score him/her. Very often questions are asked and there is no answer. The discussion ends up being a one way street of interrogation. After several swings on the specturm the prospective hire manages to blurt a few answers. But at the end the number of unanswered questions will be a lot more than those that were answered. So what could have turned out to be a pleasant experience turned out to be hostile and bitter and the prospective hire feeling that he's been singled out for the onslaught, the interviewer blaming the state of education or the screening process. Pity.
There is a way out though? The least people can do is write their resume in a way that others understand. Its not enough if only they understand it. Detail technical skills, dont be abstract. We are not doing software design here. Don't just write Oracle 9i say what exactly it is that you know - Is it that you wrote just SQL statements or do you know joins, stored procedures, or worked with java on the database. Dont write J2EE - Write Servlets, JSP, Session Bean, Entity Bean and so on. Gives the necessary weight to your resume and paradoxically it moves up and receives all the attention. Here is an example of a good resume.
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