Read between the résumé's lines

The talk of the town is that the economy is picking up. Most companies are in the hiring mode and job portals now have multitudes of résumés getting uploaded every day. While a résumé is meant to showcase the candidate’s skills, most of them turn out to be as funny as a Khushwant Singh joke book, unintentionally though. While I am no expert on writing résumés, I can for sure tell you what not to write it.

Every CV starts with a bit of your personal details in a letter pad format. The name and contact details of the candidate will suffice in the top portion. Avoid using logos of your previous organization or the political party you support. This is followed by the mandatory and ‘taken for granted’ Objective section. This column is usually meant to describe your career ambitions and preferred career path. Pity though that no one fills it up by them self and just do a Ctrl A, Ctrl C and Ctrl V from a friend’s résumé. This portion is generally filled with lofty statements, no short of an election manifesto. A typical IT professional’s objective would go like this, “To work in a highly challenging and stimulating environment which offers enormous scope for growth, innovation and new ideas”. In most cases this roughly translates to “The ungrateful superiors at my previous organization gave me peanuts for a hike and I want more money to pay the EMI for the home loan I took to buy my apartment located at a missile shooting distance from Bangalore airport”.

The most exploited part of your résumé is the skill set portion. Human nature is such that we blow up triviality into something awesome. A typical IT professional lists the programming languages he has worked on, heard about or read about its existence on the internet. A business person’s skill set would have Microsoft Office all split up and described in detail. Please note that if you know Microsoft Excel, just put it there. Detailing different versions of Excel under your skill only adds to the word count.

Every résumé features the set of projects a candidate has worked on. This is a tricky portion for an interviewer. Most candidates fill it up with execubabble aimed solely at making the content indecipherable. Sample this from an IT professional’s résumé “Worked on a comprehensive end to end project which offered utmost scope for communication with other end users offering immense challenge and space for creative ideas.” My guess is that it meant “I had an active Facebook and Orkut profile, while I was documenting my previous project”. The onus is on the interviewer to comprehend the truth behind the unintelligible text written in Times New Roman. While I am on it, I have a policy of hating résumés in Comic sans font. Remember this is a CV, not a cheap brochure detailing unlimited internet plans asking you to contact 'unlimited Shekar for more'.

Interviewers also have to be wary of self made acronyms by the candidate. So when a candidate says I worked on a NASA project, it could be referring to some Natwarlal and Sharma Agency at Gorakhpur. I sampled one résumé which said that a candidate had worked for ISROO which could easily be overlooked as ISRO.

Another clichéd résumé sham section is “Highlights and Past Achievements”. This section offers space for ostentatious projection of a candidate’s market value. Most CVs bullet point a list that starts with “Excellent Leadership skills” and rambles on. If a candidate does not justify how he can claim that he has the aforementioned quality, I would rather prefer reading a home loan pamphlet .I request candidates to note that 173 followers on twitter does not serve as an example of leadership . Organizing impromptu birthday celebrations for friends or Navarathri Kolu events for the housing colony does not qualify as a proof for Organizational skills either. Also, candidates need to make sure that mentioning trivial stuff in Past achievements adds no value. So a third prize in an intra school essay competition is better left unsaid on a résumé.

It is always better to make sure that your resume is as true to its ‘Times New Roman clad word’ as possible. More the brevity, better the résumé. Remember, the number of pages of a résumé is not proportional to the chances of you getting the top notch job. You are not replying to a show cause notice for heaven’s sake.