Resume, CV : 10 Value Additions For You! 

We all know how important jobs are in the current day scenario. Of course there are a lot of opportunities out there but you want the best of the best and rightly so. You have gone through all those hardhships in life to get to the place you are in today and the journey further will get more exciting with the job. Of course there are a few things you would want to know before applying for a job in a company or an organization. In order to do so, you would need a strong profile or a relevant profile.

How do you impress someone you don’t even know? What are the things you can use to catch their attention? How do you make sure that you have an edge while applying for a job there? If we caught your attention, READ ON..

1) WHY RESUME

This would certainly be the most important introductory step for you to secure a job in a company you desire. The resume will have a brief description about who you are. Decision makers from the company will have a look at it, try to understand who you are as a person in the professional field, how reliable you are, what your technical skills are and how you will be an asset or a value addition to the company and the reason why you are quitting your previous company. These would be the basic considerations of the person deciding whether to take you in a job or not.

And you have to make sure that you do a great job at it or you simply reduce your chances at it.

2) THE BASICS

I am sure there are a lot of sites which tell you the technical details of what a resume would look like. If you are looking for such details, I would happily refer you to a couple of links like:  Hcareers.com ; Businessinsider.com. 

However if you are looking for something beyond that, do read on. The basics would not change much, these are the ones which most of you would know and would have covered. Your professional experience, your academics, the projects you have dealt with, the vision, etc. These basics ensure that your resume will be looked at.

But you certainly would want to be a pace ahead of it, you want to be special and you want to be noticed. If that is the case, let us continue below

3) PERSONALISATION

If you have a resume which you are circulating to all the companies without any change, you might want to rethink that. If you want to impress someone or create a curiosity in them, you can’t expect to treat them like you treat everyone else. There has to be a difference, there has to be a personal touch to it. By a personal touch, I don’t mean stalking the interviewer, it means knowing as much as possible about the company and the person either through friends or the information in published media and see if there is anything in your profile related to that.

For example, if the company is looking for a sales hire and you are a people person, make sure you bring in your organizational achievements or sales achievements in your profile; or if the company is into design, talk about the design activities you were involved in.

In short, research the profile of the job you are applying to, tune up your resume accordingly and submit to the company. A one size fits all approach is never going to help you create an edge. If you want to be noticed, you need to be a little different, you need to tell them how interested you are in the job and what better way than having a customized resume for the same

4) WHAT  QUALITIES DO YOU BRING TO THE COMPANY? 

The first thing every company looks at is – What value addition you can bring to the company. When a company is hiring you, they are going to spend a lot of money on having you and they want to know if you are worthy of your money and they would like to know that with least research possible and that is exactly where your resume comes into picture.

Talk about the previous achievements in your existing or previous experiences and tell them how it will make an impact to the company. Sometimes people need to be told how they can use you. You can find ways to do that subtly in your resume. You need not go overboard in saying it explicitly, but you can always say that – You have worked on a Project X which is very similar to the project Y in their company and would like an opportunity to put your learnings to use. If you do not find enough opportunity to bring it out in your resume, make sure you do that in an interview. That will be playing to your advantage

5) WHO ARE YOU AS A PERSON

Apart from knowing your technical skills which again serve as basics for a company, they want to know who you are as a person, whether you would fit well for the company’s brand and ideology, whether you are reliable and responsible enough. Let us cut to the chase and come to one basic truth, people hire you because they like you. Granted that you have technical skills are well suited for the company, but that alone will never get you a job.

No one likes to work with a genius who is a jerk and for the company, the idea of company is bigger than an individual. So.., even if you are a genius, they want to look at the personal side of you and they want to know how well you fit the bill.

Make sure you have something in your resume which talks about your responsibility – like leading a team, holding positions of leadership, etc.

6) TAKING INITIATIVE

Although a company would love to give you a job for the work you do, it also likes to know if you can think out of the box, it would like to know if you are proactive enough to take the company to the next stage. Most people follow the rules, and they do a good job at it. But these are the ones which will be maintained on a pay roll cos they are good work horses. But if you are an ambitious person looking to get the edge, you need to come up with some proactive ideas, you need to do more than what you are expected to. Everyone does the bare minimum in life, you got to do that something extra to be noticed. And I don’t mean cozying up to the manager or the immediate senior, it means proving through your work that you are irreplaceable.

If there is anything you have done like that, it should go on the resume as an initiative started by you. This way, the company gets a better picture of you and tries to identify if you are a better fit.

7) THE CLICHES

Do any of these sound familiar

Objective – To work to the best of my knowledge and for an all round development of the company; I want to work in your esteemed organization because it is the best in the world;

The words : Proactive, motivated, Self starter, leader, great communicator, and so on…

An article in the Forbes magazine talks about the list of these cliches and why they are underrated in a job scenario – 10 cliches to ditch on a job hunt

So… Stay away from these cliches, think of your own words, be natural, be real, in other words BE YOU!

8) THE USE OF WORDS

Do not go overboard when you use certain words, do not be a glory hound and take the entire credit on yourself. Managements know that it takes team work to achieve a task and everyone knows what the job seekers are trying to do. Be real, if there is a specific contribution you have done, talk about it, tell how it influenced the company. It might be a small one, but it will certainly be reliable and more relevant than a vague statement which says you did X, Y and Z and raised the company profits, bla bla bla.. Stick to specifics and they will create the edge.

9) TALK ABOUT YOUR INTERESTS

There are a few people who are not very impressed with the presence of extra curricular activities on a resume. That is because people write things like – chatting, FB, etc on their extra curricular activities.

Write something relevant, if you were the captain of a football team, write that, if you are in a creative work write that. The co-curricular are not the ones to be neglected, they form a  part of you and if they are relevant, what better than that?

10) DON’T MISS THE YOU IN YOUR RESUME

Most companies say that you should keep a standard resume and completely formal, play it safe. But all it does is – Plays safe, it does not give you the edge you desire and the edge you deserve. This is the competitive world and you got to think outside the box to be noticed. There are a lot of talented people out there and you need to stand out to make a difference and if you miss out on an opportunity to give the real you just to be safe, then you certainly are missing out on a lot of opportunities.

So, stop worrying about being safe, go get the job you deserve!

These were the top 10 tips for creating an edge in your resume. If you have any doubts or clarifications or thoughts as to how one can improve on the resume, kindly do write to us below, we are all ears for your thoughts :)