| Logon at http://CareerTipsWeekly.blogspot.com & post your comments online In todays scenario, most of the recruitment jobs for the open positions in corporates are outsourced. Pre-screening, for example, is done by headhunters & placement consultants. These placement consultants therefore form the First Ring of the gate keepers & need to be dealt with effectively. Once you are cleared by the placement consultants, you stand a chance of meeting the Gate Keepers of the inner circle i.e., company HRD folk. Only then can you hope to get through to the man who actually might hire you! With an ineffective resume, your fate resembles that of Abhimanyu. You could bombard into the ring of placement consultants but could not get out of it ALIVE. Your resume gets buried into the files of all the placement consultants. The Industry Kurukshetra here has jobmarket Chakravyu comprising of Placement Consultants guarding the turf in the outer ring & HRD fellas guarding the precious turf as the warriors of inner concentric ring. Abhimanyu, or your resume personified, has to be totally Flawless, Energetic, Valiant & Appealing to by-pass these warriors. Abhimanyu, while in his mothers womb, had learnt from his father Arjuna on how to effectively pierce both the rings. Extensive study of articles on resume or your Professional Resume Writer may help you in making your Resume so attractive & luring in the eyes of both the kinds of Gate Keepers that these warriors actually welcome you for meeting the precious turf comprising of Hiring Heads. You need to develop strong interview techniques to win the fortress or an Offer letter. Career Doctors or good articles on the interview techniques can give you sufficient winning strategies. The JobMarket Chakravyu is impregnable for resumes of ordinary types. Piercing the Concentric circle-I to reach the Concentric circle-II & piercing the Concentric Circle-II to meet the precious Hiring Heads & eventually coming out with an offer or appointment letter is no joke. There are ways and means of developing the resume keeping the psycho-graphic & other factors that govern the working patterns and beliefs of both the kinds of Gate Keepers. Bypassing the Outer ring comprising of Placement Consultants: So, simply blasting a poorly written resume doesnt cut ice with placement consultants. The tribe of placement consultants has developed a keen scanning eye & can easily & fatally bury your resume in his files forever. The reasons could be many. Maybe you have no talking personal letter addressed to him. Maybe you never spoke to him. But mainly it is because your resume is badly made & doesnt give him the feel of a winning professional. He is certainly not interested in proposing a professional with a losing streak(s) (amply present in your poorly written resume) to his client company. Even if you have never spoken to him, your resume speaks. And a poorly written resume talks death of the professional. Even if you have been speaking to him & cultivating him for years. This placement consultant gatekeeper has over the years fine-tuned his senses. He is a pucca businessman & he doesnt relish bidding on an ordinary horse or a donkey. Your resume should appeal to a placement consultant. It should unleash substantial creative juices flow in this businessman & he should start seeing your resume as a thick wad of money or a cheque to be earned from his client company. This is a psychographic situation to be created by your all powerful & ascending resume being presented as a marketing tool rather than as a stale compendium of history. Your appropriately made resume must put most of the placement consultants in a competition to get you immediate job change. Bypassing the inner ring comprising of corporate HRD folks
is equally important & involves much more than putting together a resume in a layout and format that is pleasing to the eye. Effective resume writing alone can help you by-pass both kinds of Gate Keepers & it involves art, science, and a large helping of technology. Many HRD Gate Keepers trash functional resumes as soon as they see them. Use a chronological resume format. If you apply for jobs online or through e-mail, paper quality and scannability are unimportant. Content, structure, format, and Strategy are much more important. Gate Keepers and hiring Heads view functional resumes with suspicion. Authors of resume writing books, and unsophisticated resume writers who subscribe to their views, often advocate functional resumes for three reasons: it is a simple solution to a complex problem, the advocates do not know better, and they do not have to live with the consequences. If you assume that most people who make hiring decisions are of above-average intelligence, it stands to reason that they would recognize an overused method of hiding information. If you know how the human eye travels, and understand Gate Keepers psychology, you can hide negative information in plain sight. HRD Gate Keepers are very fussy about the resume but at the same time they tend to accept the recommendations of the placement consultant. So, if your resume is approved by the placement consultant, most of the job is done & the Inner ring of HRD warriors crumbles to a large extent. It can disappear completely, if the mindset of a HRD Gate Keeper is kept in mind while designing the resume. And lo! You get a date with the Hiring Head. Here the resume needs certain attributes & you need certain interview techniques to enable you to win the Offer / Appointment Letter Jackpot which we will discuss in the forthcoming issue. Maybe Abhimanyu now needs a charioteer of the likes of SriKrishna to reveal the Srimad Bagwad Gita for winning the interview war.
See you later in the next issue. | 
