Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Less is More - Building a resume

Let me tell you a story. Being in NAL was the best learning time I had in my working life. I learnt so much. Within the first 6 months, I had done analysis in ansys, designing in solidworks and programming in visual basic and fortran. The pace continued. I loved the work i was doing.

Then a year passed and i decided to craft a resume and send it out there. The resume i created was decent and i thought it had all the right ingredients to get me lot of interview calls.

But all i got was empty email inbox. No acknowledgement, let alone an interview call. Thinking its the fault of my resume, i tweaked and tweaked it but none got me any call.

Baffled. I analyzed why others got the call and not me even when the resume clearly matched the requirement. All this while i continue building my skills.

Then one fine day i realized my mistake. Since i had worked on so many projects, my resume was bloated. In an effort to impress the recruiter that i know so much, i crammed all my work into the resume. This list baffled the receiver of the resume. It distracted him or her and since there were so many projects, it dimmed the effect of the one that matched the profile.

Fortunately i caught this mistake early and then divided all my project and its descriptions into 3 resumes. Now i began putting only those projects in the sent resumes that were relevant to the profile. Kept the resume brief and sharp.

This did the magic and this little shift had me called for 3 interviews.

Less is more, when it comes to building your resume to get an interview call.

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