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Anjali Prayag

Resume writing is considered an art and a resume, an advertisement of an individual's achievement. A great resume doesn't just tell future employers what milestones that an aspirant has achieved in his career, but makes the same assertion that all good ads do. It convinces employers that the candidate has what it takes to be successful in this new position or career.

Every year, the US-based Professional Association of Resume Writers writes and rewrites thousands of resumes to suit the industry and the job that the candidate is looking for. In India, though resume writing is not yet considered a profession, placement consultants provide all assistance to all their candidates. Kris Lakshmikanth, Founder-CEO and Managing Director, The Head Hunters, a Bangalore-based placement consultancy firm, says he rejects almost 50 per cent of the resumes he receives because they are badly written. And this problem is more frequently noticed among senior executives than the juniors, he reveals. One reason for this could be that successful managers do not have the time to write a bio-data. Or they write 7-8 pages of irrelevant description of their jobs that will not interest the future employer anyway.

That's why resume writing is still considered an art and a resume, an advertisement of an individual's achievement. Experts in the talent selection area say that a great resume doesn't just tell future employers what milestones that aspirant has achieved in his career, but makes the same assertion that all good ads do: If you buy this product, you will get these benefits. It convinces employers that the candidate has what it takes to be successful in this new position or career. Says Kalpana Rao, a consultant with FiveM Consultants, a Bangalore-based placement consultancy firm, "It should be pleasing to the eye and should inspire the prospective employer to pick up the phone and ask you to come in for an interview." She agrees with Lakshmikanth that several senior executives are unaware of the dos and don'ts and slip up on basic rules.

For instance, most of them do not realise that listing job responsibilities is vital, but the future employer is more interested in what the candidate has achieved in his role in the organisation. For instance, a senior sales executive might list out the geographical areas he has handled, the number of sales officers he has managed or give the sales turnover of his branch. But more important is to list the achievements such as: whether he has achieved his monthly target, the budget he was allotted, the kind of promotion campaigns he undertook for the purpose, his market share compared to rivals, and what difference he has made to the organisation since he took over.

Lakshmikanth quotes the instance of a very senior sales manager who was looking for a change and approached him. "His resume listed all his achievements in the operations department with very little mention of sales experience. If I had sent the bio-data without corrections, he would have been rejected right away." Most often, the candidates, without meaning to, add irrelevant experience or delete relevant experience, which weaken their chances of selection.

What does it mirror?

So how much of the candidate's profile is actually reflected in a resume? According to Dhruv Shenoy, Vice-President, Marketing, Monsterindia.com, "Even though 75 per cent of the resumes have clichéd career objectives stating "Looking for a challenging career, etc", most resumes clearly reflect the personality of the job seeker. A resume shows whether one pays attention to details, or has a logical mind or is good at communication skills, etc."

An astute HR manager can clearly recognise whether the person he is likely to interview is aggressive, a go-getter, team player, leader or an achiever.

"A resume is supposed to reflect your personality and a job seeker should ensure that it does to make it stand out from the rest," he advises. Most people write resume because they have to have one to get a job. Some even write it grudgingly, as if to fulfil an obligation. Says Rao, "Resume writing is slightly above filling out income tax forms if you take the pleasure you gain out of it." She says most of them do not muster genuine enthusiasm for churning out a good piece. But surprisingly there are some companies whose executives uniformly have high quality resumes. "We do not know how or why this happens, but a candidate from HLL or P&G would very rarely have a slipshod resume."

Lakshmikanth says candidates from the manufacturing sector do not know how to present themselves in their resumes. On the other hand, the service-sector job aspirants are more clued on to the trends in resume writing.

Gautam Sinha, CEO, TVA Infotech, a Bangalore-based IT recruitment firm, says, in IT having an impressive resume is extremely critical. "In other sectors, the companies that you have worked for speak for you. That's half the brand-building done. But in IT, the skill sets you have are of prime importance and how you present it is also equally important." This is especially critical for candidates in the one to eight years' experience category.

With the growth of the e-recruitment business, companies have evolved a standardised format for resumes.

Sinha says companies such as Infosys and Oracle have standard resume forms that the candidates are expected to fill. This removes all confusion and the resumes are pucca. The Net recruitment trend has brought with it a problem that companies are struggling to handle. Companies such as Wipro and Infosys receive about 4-5 lakh resumes every year and they neither have the time nor the inclination to sort them out. So the `key word' phenomenon is taking over. Resumes are scanned and sorted by key words such as Java, SAP, US, UK, etc. This will eliminate the basic misfits for the jobs.

Shenoy of Monsterindia.com lists some common fields to all career levels and industries across the globe: "Contact details, objective, career summary, work experience in reverse chronological order, skills, education, additional information, references and personal details. He says there might be a slight variation from one industry to other. For example, in the IT industry, project details would be an additional field and skills need to be prominent. In case of pharmaceutical or research fields the kind of papers one has presented and the forum in which one has presented needs to be highlighted as against the skills."

His advise to candidates is that given that employers and recruiters expect a certain amount of standardisation, the key in resume writing is to highlight the key and critical skills in a way that the employer/recruiter notices. Thus, one can say that the format is standardised but the writing style is an art.

Does deceit work?

The e-recruitment trend has not come without its problems: Feigning in resumes to get an interview call is becoming common. Lakshmikanth whose company receives about 20,000 resumes a day says there is not a single resume that is 100 per cent correct. "It may be intentional or a genuine mistake, but no resume reflects exactly what the candidate is doing." In IT, it's more rampant because the skill sets are constantly changing and the candidates feel the need to possess the current set of skills.

According to a survey in the US, an overwhelming 75 per cent of the job seekers said that they lied in their resumes. Even HR managers are aware that the job seekers stretch the truth whilst writing about their skills and responsibilities. Areas where they could misrepresent are skill sets, job responsibility and salary.

"The truth, however, is that a misrepresentation of resume can get an interview call but the lie would be found out sooner than later," maintains Shenoy. Concurs Sinha of TVA, "Though there's very little chance for lying, some people do it. But they are caught at the interview stage. They may lie about the period of the project or how long they have been on the project, but they cannot lie about their skill sets."

Enhancing the period of contribution to the project or reducing the bench period is a common practice among all candidates. "Whether this would amount to fraud or deceit, one cannot say," says Sinha. But there is very little scope to fabricate educational qualification or previous experience.

Pankaj Khanna, Vice-President and Head, Channel Sales and Search practice, Jobstreet.com, an e-recruitment company has a different story to tell, "In three years, we have serviced 10,000 customers and not even in one resume there has been misrepresentation. Where candidates have erred is in mentioning whether the MBA is full-time or part-time."

Rao says this kind of errors occur very often in all resumes. "Another frequently committed error is that juniors copy the bio-datas of their seniors, in the hope that their resumes would impress the future employers." She has come across junior executives who list their boss' responsibilities as their own. "But when we do a resume scan they invariably get caught and have to rewrite their resumes."

Job seekers have to realise that their resumes do not go through a selection process but an elimination process. An HR executive or a placement consultant usually does not have more than `30 seconds' to decide whether the resume should go to the next round of `selection (read elimination)', articulates Shenoy. He further explains, "So if one has to catch the attention of the recruiter in these crucial `30 seconds', one has to have the credentials of working in a top company, or skills highlighted prominently or a resume title that conveys the strength of one's experience and skills."

Lakshmikanth of Head Hunters puts it this way: "Resumes are like jatakams. One look at it and the prospective employer accepts or rejects it." Studies in the area have also shown that almost 90 per cent of the time, the success of the candidate depends on the resume presentation.

How has it changed?

The most important transformation is that hard copies are dead and most companies insist on soft copies of bio-data. Sinha remembers, "When we started the business we used to have huge box files of resumes for each sector. Now we virtually work in a paperless office." The most acceptable form of sending the resume is now through the `Apply Online' feature on job sites or by sending a soft copy over email. But Rao says some of the traditional sector companies still insist on hard copies. In fact, she quotes the instance of a candidate (a fairly senior executive) from an FMCG company who just a year ago confessed he did not have an e-mail id and hence was unaware of how to send a soft copy. Though it is a norm that job seekers send their resumes by e-mail, at the time of the interview candidates are required to carry a hard copy of one's resume.

Another change that has crept in is the absolute necessity to give details of the candidate's skill sets. Sinha finds that many software professionals do not write minute details and the specifics. "Details are very important in new-age companies. In product-based companies, when recruitment is happening for a specific job, this will not work. In mass-based recruitment, when thousands of people are being hired, then it's okay."

Shenoy too elaborates on the need for details: The broad information that has been the hallmark of a good resume has not changed much. However, the detailing that one expects out of a resume has definitely undergone a major transformation. Given the emergence of software professionals and project based skills, it has become almost mandatory for a job seeker to write about his skills and experience in as much detail as possible for the employer or the recruiter to make that crucial `go/no go' decision.

As Rao says, "It is a mistake to think of your resume as just a history of your past, as a personal statement or as some sort of self expression. The resume if written from the intention to create interest, to persuade the employer to call you, then will not be a feeble product."

Illustration: V.M. Raja

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