Originally Posted by
monica
Thanks everyone for such an encouraging response, Naveen, Dhanesh, Vikrant, Shubha Chand ji, Sushil ji, appreciate your good wishes! The number of resumes received has been big enough to keep me occupied the last few days, infact I am yet to get back to a some people with the inputs and hope to do it really soon. It was also a pleasure to know that many people from our community are doing so well proffesionaly.
After going through all these resumes I felt that there were certain common areas of concern in most of these. I think it would be worthwhile for me to share these with everybody:
1. Any HR person screening a resume in order to decide whether a person should be called for an interview has a broad guideline from the technical manager about the required level of education, experience and the kind of company a candidate should have worked in earlier. The great details about ones expereince are to be discussed only during the interview and any interview panel will always make sure that they have collected material on all the aspects of your work whch is relevant to them during their discussion with you.
2. For the above mentioned reason, one page resume is considered to be ideal for atleast upto an experience of 4-5 years since it is capable of containing all the information for making a decision on whether or not to shortlist a resume.
3. A lot of unnecessary information can be cut down from the resume, if not asked for specifically by the company, like: date of birth (your experience can give a good idea abt that in any case), father's name, permanent address (correspondence address is just fine, some people write both which is not required), Languages known (if its any language other than English / Hindi, only then mention this field), 'Resume' / 'CV' as heading for ones resume, writing ones name and date in the end and signature (not required, your name is in any case on the top of the resume).
All these things take a lot of very precious space on your resume and are not needed by the HR ppl.
3. Avoid writing in paragraphs, bullets are better for a short and crisp view.
4. Try and write each point in no more than one point, look for ways by which three four words can be expressed in one word, two three points can be combined as one point in order to cut down space they take.
5. As a general guideline, for an experience of every 1-2 yrs, mention no more than 3 most important points as part of your job description. If you write more than this, you would be going into micro level details which are not needed. Please remember that a resume helps only in your getting shortlisted for an interview, after that its your personality, presentation and experience thats going to get you through.
6. Write hobbies and interest only if you cant find anything else to fill up the space to make the resume one page. As far as trainings that you have attended are concerned, write only those which are really exceptional, any training which would make you really stand out.
7. In case of people in IT industry, I feel its better to not write in terms of project description of each project that one may have handled. This would make the resume unnecessary bulky, just write the broad responsibilities handled by you in any particular company. The technologies you have worked on will be in any case be covered in the Technical Skills summary that most people present encompassing the technologies, databases, applications, operating systems one has been exposed to.
These are some of the most common areas on which I felt that inputs needed to be given for the various resumes received so far. These might be relevant to a lot of others as well whose resumes I have not seen. In case any of you has a different point of view on any of these, or has any other concerns, I would be glad to hear from you.
Regards
Monica