INTRODUCTION

As part of this and some upcoming blogs, I intend to help the fresh college grads, starters, or experienced folks in the tech industry, gain some perspective into how resumes are supposed to work.

In this blog, I embarrassingly produce one of my resumes, from my archives. In the next blog, I produce my latest resume. The contrast intends to demonstrate:

●The mistakes done by a rookie job hunter.

●The clear lack of content, presentation, and confidence presented by a poorly created resume and

●The fulsomeness of the same qualities, in the new resume.

Even before I go ahead, I’d like to tell my readers that in case any of you did the same mistakes, as I did, and feel bad for yourselves. Take heart ! ( meaning try to gain your courage )

Because while this blog demonstrates .. how easy is it for an undirected soul to make such blunders. The next will demonstrate how easy again, it is for a directed hunter to gain ground.

And, as we’ve already seen, once recognized, how easy would it be for anyone to fix these follies.

Let’s begin my walk of shame !

Summary

This section illuminates us about the fact that I am a software engineer ( big surprise ), and that I’d like to do good in life ( wow ! that’s unique ). And that’s it … the summary wanted to leave the party sober.

And couldn’t I have used bigger font size, coz, of course, difficult reading makes for happy recruiters.

Skills:

Having worked many many years in the industry … this is all that came out.

And, with so much text and vague details, I was surely ( … well figuratively ) trying to kill the recruiter by boredom !

Maybe the next section brings some light !

Projects:

On second thoughts, maybe not ! The gloom from the Skill section continues …

Let us look at the mistakes objectively:

●No quantification whatsoever !

●Personal contribution is completely vague. e.g. caching relevant data, data access patterns etc.

●Little technical vocabulary used; therefore the resume doesn’t appeal to core technical recruiters.

●Partial data e.g. rewriting queries, therefore the resume doesn’t appeal to the non-tech recruiters.

●And the above would only be when … a recruiter BOTHERS TO READ SO MUCH TEXT !!

Employment:

Not much is wrong with this section, except for the fact the details are redundant with project details and skills.

The obstacle showed the way

Now that we’ve already learned about the basics of creating a resume, yes, the mistakes look silly. But,

●What if I told you that all the above details belonged to one of the performers in the team and his organization.

●What if I told you that the exact same skills and projects were converted into a fabulous portfolio over a duration of failure and learning.

For each un-responded application, I used to call the recruiter and ask them the reason for not considering my profile. With each feedback, I polished my profile.

●What if I told you that having corrected the mistakes, the person received more interview calls that he was able to handle.

My phone used to ring off the hook, and I was sure my team knew that I was leaving. In fact, I ended up missing most of my lunchtimes because of the number of interviews scheduled for me.

So yes, it is okay for an undirected soul to make blunders and act silly, so long as the person doesn’t lose heart and keeps learning from his mistakes.

The resume we see next is the end result of many failures, inquisitions, learning, and improvements.

Write back, in case you have an opinion. Like what you read – do like, comment and share.