A CV or a Resume is the first document that introduces you to the Company. A covering letter along with your CV, can make a good first impression or a bad impression on your recruiter. A majority of the employee make these common mistakes in their over excitement, which makes them non- eligible for the right job. It is next to impossible to understand the capabilities of a person in one glance over a 4 page document. But it is definitely possible to understand the incapabilities of a person in this one glance.
With the Pandemic, a lot of people have lost their jobs and some are on the verge of loosing their jobs. It is that tough time, when people are searching for new jobs and the first document that introduces you to the Recruiter is your CV. During this time, there is just one position and the number of applicants sometimes are in a few hundreds or thousands. So, a Recruiter, will barely have a few minutes or in some cases seconds to decide whether they are going to see your CV and even consider you for the said position.
If you fail to convince the recruiter to read your CV Entirely, then it is difficult that you may get a call for the interview.
A few things that I am writing down may seem upfront and rude, but sometimes it is important that people understand these basic concepts before they send across a Resume.
Email Subject
The subject of the email is very important. Remember the Recruiter gets 100’s of CV’s for different positions. If you are going to send an email without a proper subject, it would barely help the Recruiter. The subject of the email needs to be very crisp. Even if you just mention the position that you are applying for that would be sufficient. The subject of the email is subjective and need not have entire detail.
Covering Letter/ Email
Covering letter or the body of the email, which you are going to send to your future employer needs to have some basic details about you. The Covering letter should mention, which position you are applying for, where you are presently working and little bit detail about your self. Like the number of years of experience in the particular field. In maximum 5-10 lines you should be able to cover these topics.
Objective
A person makes his CV and applies for a Job because he wants to grow in life. But how he wants to grow is upto him. He needs a vision of his own for the same. So be sure that you address this clause with something original, do not copy paste some quote by some random person just because it looks good to hear. Any individual will prefer a person with a practical objective than any fancy quotes by some random person.
Personal Details:
When you mention about your personal details mention about your name, Education Qualification, Marital Status, Age. The reason behind adding Age is just to ensure that there were no gaps in your career. Your Age should be more or less justify the number of years of experience. For Example if you have passed out college 20 years ago, your work experience should be technically around 18 to 20 years in the same field. If you had to take a gap in your education or Work life. It is better to explain the same in a single line.
It is an interesting concept on why the Marital Status of the Candidate matters to the Company. If you were to be hired in a Company abroad, nobody would have made speculations about your personal lives or personal choices, but India everybody loves predicting the future. If you are around 25-35 years of age, the chances are you may get married or you may be newly married or become new parents. Which means that if you are a woman, you may have to take a maternity break and if you are a man, you may look for better opportunities because you may have additional responsibilities.
Work Experience:
Always start with your present work experience and then mention the previous ones. Keep it crisp and short and do not mention additional unnecessary details. Always mention your achievements rather than your scope of work at your previous job. The recruiters are more interested in knowing what difference did you bring to the previous company with your achievements. Unnecessary details will only set off the Recruiter.
Do not boast about yourself in your work experience. The Human Resource Department at any Company is smart enough to find out whether you actually achieved the accomplishment that you had mentioned in the previous work experience. Talking positive about your experience helps but boasting does not help at all. Infact, it gives a very negative image about you.
Too much information or too little information
This is a very challenging aspect. Should there be too much information about you or too little information about you. There is one simple trick to deal with this tricky question. Just ask yourself if considering the information given in the CV, would there be something else left to talk about you when you meet face to face. If the answer is yes, then you have sufficient information.Would the recruiter have to call you back and ask simple questions again and again. If the answer is yes then you do not have sufficient information on your CV.
It does not matter if your CV runs into two pages of four pages, till the time your information is communicated. There is no guarantee that a 20 page CV will get you your dream job. Information has to be crisp, that is what matters in the end.
Presentation of your CV
A lot of people use fancy formats these days for sending across their CV. Sometimes, it is ok, but sometimes, it reflects as a sign of immaturity. Too much design on your CV may distract the recruiter and he may not be able to read the main points in your CV.
It is important that you stick to the basic presentation, so that it looks neat and clean and not clumsy. A border is fine but too many flowers or cartoons are not until and unless you are not applying for the job of a graphic designer or an animator.
Read the Openings carefully
This is one aspect a lot of people do not do. Please read the details mentioned in the Advertisement . It is always good to ask questions, but one should know when to ask questions. Do not ask basic questions, the answers of which are already mentioned in the Advertisement.
Remember this is an era of Google. 90% of the information about the Company is already available online. Do some research before meeting the Human Resources for the Interview. When you talk about the Company even the Interviewer fels that you have taken some efforts to be a part of the Company.
These are a few pointers that I had mentioned above. No CV is perfect, but yes we can definately skip a few frequent mistakes that we make.
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