The session that Ranjani Mani and I did on #resume and #career related questions last week brought up a few points

1. The importance of having a resume that can reflect who you are:

A hiring manager on average receives hundreds of profiles for an open position. From my experience, it can be between in hundreds for entry-level positions to around 100 for experienced positions. With such a stiff probability, it is imperative that you have the top half of your 1st page in the resume capture the value that you bring to the table. Please focus on that real estate in your resume – for it might end up deciding whether your resume gets the eyeballs.

2. There is no one resume that can fit all the roles :

Make no mistake, I am not asking you to cook up things that you have not done to fit the job description, but, if you are leveraging your “consulting skills” resume for “Business analysis” roles, you will be doing yourself no favor. In this case, you need to go a bit deeper in your consulting role and highlight the frameworks, data-gathering techniques, and analytics skills to stand a chance in the “Business Analysis” role. So next time around, please understand the role, draw a mental map of things that you have done in your role that resonate with the JD, and then update the base resume before sending it over.

3. People still have not understood the value of networking :

One of my mentors made it very clear to me that “We network during the good times so that we have the net to fallback during the bad times”. The probability of someone helping you when you send a connection and then ask for help is significantly lower than someone with whom you have been connected over a period of time. So next time around, don’t wait for things to go downhill before reaching out.

4. Career move is not about completing a course and showcasing yourself as a subject-matter-expert:

I have seen many resumes that more or less look like a cut & paste of the syllabus of a certificate program. When someone has 20 analytics models in his/her resume under “Skills” and does not have projects to elaborate on them, these terms might actually be pulling down your candidature. Please think twice before highlighting these skills. You never know who is on the other side interviewing you.

There were a few more questions that I will try to capture in my next post.

Hope you find these points helpful.