Few secrets of getting that ring

Blog XXVI of Thirty Days – Thirty Blogs series

Few blogs back, I talked about my pursuit of naukri, which was a global overview about how and what helped me become employed. I tried to share some tips and tricks and I was surprised at the enthusiasm that the blog received. I had made a mental note then to elaborate on certain aspects of job search in future posts.

One of the most dreaded stage of job search is the waiting period when you apply through various channels and cross your fingers hoping that you would get that golden ring from employers soon. Everybody have their own tips & tricks when it comes to beating others at getting an interview call, here are some of mine:

• As an old adage goes, teach your child how to fish and he would eat for the rest of his life. Many of the points below were borne out of an innate desire to get some kind of a competitive edge over other job aspirants because frankly speaking, there exist very few differences. Everybody is smart now-a-days and you simply cannot afford to let your skills speak for yourself. Often in USA, it is not the best technical resume, but the best marketing resume that gets the initial call. To be in the priority list of employers, you need to adopt this kind of attitude. Once you do that, remaining points would appear trivial. Utilise all available resources you might have at hand for your job search.
• Portfolio/proof of work accompanying your resume helps the employers in making the leap from “Can he do this for me ?” to “Alright, he can do it, lets call him !”. Before you think this point is applicable only to arts majors, think about your LinkedIn recommendations, letters from professors or word from an ex-colleague.
• Professional website, in continuation to the point above, can be used to provide past work samples as well as detailed information that you could not squeeze in your one page resume. I log visitor statistics on my website & I can tell you that many prospective employers checked it before calling. It also gives you a 2-3 days heads up on whom to expect a call from to fine tune your preparation. Of course, as you can see on my website, one does not need to be a webmaster to develop a basic website template.
• App marathon was the name I gave to my Friday night or Saturday morning sessions when I would stop breathing, sleeping, eating and drinking for few hours and do nothing else but apply to various positions online. Also I would update an excel matrix with the status and date of my application so that I do not miss out visiting any company’s website for too long. This helped me a lot in going systematically through my desired company’s list. It also helps in maintaining temporal locality as explained in previous post.
• Be proactive in replying to even mundane HR emails asking for same old stuff. I am not saying HR would put an endorsement on your application but atleast it helps them understand that you are sincere about application. If the HR person gets to make a random call, he would surely reject people who took a week just to reply back. Also if you are speaking to a consultant, it would help him understand your interest in job seeking and will directly determine his commitment towards you.
• Resume crowd-sourcing: sometimes there are different ways of saying the same thing and you realise it only when you observe other people’s resume. If your employers are using a keyword search or looking for a specific phrase in your resume, you can miss out, so be sure to ask your peers to review your resume time & again and also politely ask for their resumes to see what kind of keywords/phrases have they used.
• Never too late: If in the last post, I was driving the point that you can never be over-networked then let me also emphasise that it is never too early to start networking. I attended my first career fair at TAMU as a fresh student. I was carrying along a handbag then to collect various goodies being distributed and in between, I tried talking with people from various companies. It might be coincidental but one of my later interviews happened on the basis of a recruiter relation that started in the first semester with a a free T-shirt request. Three semesters later, the recruiter was impressed to see me appear for every career fair and probably put in a strong endorsement for an onsite call. At another company, I was able to answer one of those spot on questions about “what do you know about us” pretty well because I had been hearing that marketing talk from them for over an year.
• Second chances are rare but when you see them, you should grab them. On one specific instance, I landed a dud interviewer who for sure would have thrown away my resume but I salvaged the situation by simply re-entering the company booth but this time choosing to approach another interviewer. Second time around, interviewer was more patient  and I was more confident, we clicked and I got an on campus interview call soon afterwards.
• Read through your resume also, and not just keep on preparing the technical stuff. Remember most interviewers would start off with “tell me about yourself” and “tell me about this project” questions and if you have not read your resume ever since the day you typed it, you are going to be in a tight spot.
• On-campus and on-call interviewers are professionals but humans first. They are equally susceptible to sleep and limited attention span. When given a choice, try to schedule your interviews at around 10am in the morning because that is when people are most charged. In case there are multiple people being interviewed, try to get yourself in second/third spot and then try and find out from the first person the kind of questions they are asking so that you are not caught off guard.
• As you would personalise your resume and cover letters, it might be difficult to keep track of different versions. A good option is to use some way to indicate versioning in your resume. I include a LUO date on the footer of my resume. On two occasions, I remember asking the interviewer for the LUO date to figure out if they had my latest resume or not.