Resume writing is the buzzword now-a-days, which one comes across while applying for jobs. The stress is now laid upon new creative writing about one’s career objectives, accomplishments and suitability to one particular job.
There are a number of job portals offering services for resume development. Stylish English laced with hype of achievement by the candidates in the successive job hopping are indeed eye catching but not really helpful towards short listing the candidate’s profile for an interview. Telephone calls offering the services for resume writing keep on coming and the candidates willy-nilly have to pay hefty sums for the same. But the statistics show even the online applications do not beget enough responses despite the effective resumes prepared by the experts of the job portals. Those still insist on applying to at least one hundred places regularly.
What is a resume? When a pedagogue in communication management class asked the above question to the students, most of them gave one reply. They said that a resume is a collection of personal facts that the employee submits to the employer while applying for a position. But the teacher was not satisfied for he said there was some thing missing in such answer. Indeed it was true!
The information served to the employers not only has to be personal but must be relevant and related.
Relevance and Relatedness
Writing unnecessary facts in a bio-data makes it bulky and irrelevant. Writing a curriculum vitae has changed over the time. Gone are the days, when people used to buy printed bio-data formats and just put the information in the order given beforehand.
Relevant - facts given in a in it has to be relevant. One has to mention the facts which the employer really needs in the formal screening of his candidature not the immaterial things those the employer hardly look forward to receive from the applicants. One can think about an instance. In the earlier days the candidates mentioned in their CVs the names of their guardians and even the positions in which their guardians worked for. If someone’s father was a teacher, he did mention the same details along with the name.
But now-a-days, in an over-competitive and technical world such a thing has lost importance. A candidate may be the grandson of a Governor of a State in a country, but that would hardly serve the specificity of the needs of the employer.
Relatedness - means if an employer wants a sales manager, there is no point in mentioning that the applicant received the best actor’s award twice in his college-days. But it was happening earlier. People would mention such achievements just the impress the selectors. This kind of information is not related to job.
An applicant must retain the relevance and relatedness in the structures of information given in his bio-data.
Thanks to the need of relevance and relatedness in the CV writing, the selectors and the Human resource experts felt the style of writing and presenting the information in it had to change. A new term was appended to the old one. It became Customized CV writing.
What is Customized CV writing?
- A customized Curriculum Vitae is the one particularly designed as per the needs of the advertisement of the employer.
- It is fully focused on the relevant facts sorted according to the needs of the employer.
- Facts presented in it are absolutely relevant and inter-related.
- Facts must be presented in full-fledged ness of clarity and order.
- Facts mentioned in the CV must be true.
Steps for writing a Customized Curriculum Vitae
- First of all, a complete understanding of the needs of the employer for the employment has to done by fully reading the job advertisement.
- The important considerations of the employer for short-listing a candidate can be done by underlining the eligibility criteria mentioned in the advertisement.
- Literally speaking the applicant should try to step in to the shoes of the employer and find out the purpose behind the words mentioned in the advertisement. Applying randomly just like sending stereo-typed bio-data to all employers can not fetch any result. It would be like darting arrows in the darkness which would bring a response once in a thousand times. That response might be a lukewarm telephonic call hardly having a chance for a call to the interview.
- After ascertaining the considerations for the eligibility of the candidature, the applicant has now to compose the facts in an order needed by the employer.
- A prior understanding must be carried in the mind that time allotted to the scrutiny of one bio-data is twenty seconds. If the software vetting the applications in the employer’s computer does not find the writing suitable, it would reject it forthwith.
- The composing of the bio should begin with the “objective” part of application.
Writing the Objective
When one mentions about the objective of applying for the job, he makes it clear that what he has in his mind about the position he is seeking for. Resume Objective gives a good impression to the employer that the candidate’s objective meets his personal requirements of the search for people.
Resume Objective must not be a declaration or statement for the candidate’s personal goals in life.
Seeking the satisfaction of personal ambitions would not convince the employer in hiring anybody.For example if the applicant writes about his objective in the following style- “To utilize my skills and achievement in advancing my personal growth and career advancement “, it would not make the selector interested at all. He would know that the applicant is individualistic and does not have considerations for the growth of the organization.
A clear and cogent objective would be:-“To combine my innovative marketing skills as a member of your sophisticated marketing team”; this would of course make the employer feel good about the candidate’s intention of applying.
Your Resume Objective statement has to match in doing greater good towards personal and organizational goals.
Structuring the Information
For example, the columns that we create for revealing our age, caste, marital status, nationality, details of the parents, most of the times become unnecessarily redundant for the employer. If someone writes his name as ‘Mr. James Bond’, then what is the necessity of creating another information box as SEX and mentioning below it male? Is the advertiser a fool that he can not understand from the ‘Mr.’ before your name that you have to again specify your gender. Relevance of information in the light of the need of the employer is very important.
Usually information in the CV can be categorized as;
- General information
- Specific information.
General information is the data commonly required by all, which has to be succinctly produced in the bio-data. A person has to make utmost discretion in the kind of the general information that is mentioned in the previous point of this article. Great care and caution must be taken to avoid the repetitive and unnecessary data given as general information.
Secondly it is specific information, which relies thoroughly on the requirements of the employer.
Be very tactful and truthful while producing such information. Maintain the sequence in which the employer has wanted the data.
Examples of specific information are educational qualification, work experience, specific mentioning of work data needed by the employer. It is very important to combine both general and specific information, for your CV to be the best representation of your skills and abilities.
- An intelligent writer of the CV gives the just required details of general information and omits the unnecessary ones.
- Secondly he merges with that the useful data in the category of specific information.
- The specific information that has to be submitted is determined from the details of job requirements or eligibility criteria in the advertisement.
Read the CV repeatedly before sending.
A customized CV is prepared only as per the needs of one employer, it has to be remembered here that the same CV may not qualify for another employer.
A customized CV takes at best one page or quarter of another page. The candidate has to see to it several times that perusing the CV should not take more than twenty seconds.
The necessity of a covering letter
The covering letter is the new naming of the application that one used to send along with bio-data in the earlier days. Although some experts oppose the very idea of sending a covering letter, actually most of the selectors need a covering letter because of the following grounds;
- A covering letter clearly says the source of application. Whether the candidate got to know about the vacancy from the newspaper, internet or by some recommendation of consultants and well-wishers.
- A bio-data is the graphical presentation of data, but a covering letter lucidly explains why a candidate thinks him suitable for the advertised job.
A well-prepared covering letter can illustrate what the candidate thinks about the employer’s profile and how he has extended his courtesy in offering his candidature.
The space allotted to a quintessential CV is one page taking in to considerations the time limitation for short listing a candidate. In case of experienced candidate it can be at best two pages long.
