By Tina Jindal
Competition for procuring jobs in imminent organizations is only increasing with time. With rampant industrialization and urbanization, employment opportunities are being created with panache, yet, many candidates find themselves in the lurch when it comes to getting selected for a particular job profile.
The reasons for rejection aren’t very many, foremost being the presentation of your resume. A resume is nothing but a description of your achievements in a nutshell. Compact and precise, it delivers to the management a glimpse of your competencies and inherent personality.
Companies when hiring are bombarded with a staggering number of resumes. The kinds that grab their attention are the unique ones which convey the candidates’ potential in a gist. The aim behind writing a resume is to get noticed and be called for an interview as soon as possible. It is, therefore, important to format and package your resume in ways that make it shine amongst many others. Jobs for freshers are hard to land, making it all the more imperative to make a good first impression.
Conventional Styles
Since time immemorial a specific, basic, format has been employed for writing resumes. Such documents were successful and effective in their own way. Some of the traditional types of resumes are:
Common layouts of traditional resumes
Chronological: It begins with listing a brief introduction of your work experience followed by your educational qualifications and personal information. While framing each section, a reverse chronological order must be followed, with the latest achievements mentioned first. This category is favored by job seekers with a well-defined, strong employment history.
Combination: This category helps in highlighting the specific skill-set that is required for a particular job profile. Experience in industry and skills acquired are mentioned first followed by the work history. Through this type of resume, companies can effectively sort candidates according to their preferred requirements.
Functional: This type of resume focuses specifically on an individual’s skill set and not so much on the employment details. A very effective tool, it is mostly used in case of breaks in work history, or when an individual decides to reinvent his career.
Targeted: As the name suggests, this type of resume is tailor made for a specific designation posted by a particular company. It completely focuses on the skills and qualifications required for the vacant job profile as opposed to others which provide a snapshot of all your acquired and inherent competencies.
Reinvented varieties
Although conventional resumes have their own charm and place in the job seeking enterprise, with constant evolution comes the need to innovate and reinvent. As such, several non-traditional methods of formulating a resume have surfaced, which are fast gaining popularity in the employment circuit.
The era of paper documents is passé; here are some of the latest resume writing trends that have become viral with time:
Online profile: With social media portals fast taking center stage, having an account ‘online’ has become indispensable. Not just for casual socializing, websites like LinkedIn offer a great platform to portray your achievements and core competencies; in short, your resume. A profile on LinkedIn can be designed to reflect a conventional resume, which can be easily printed as a PDF version to obtain a hard copy.
Online recruiting is one of the best strategies employed by hiring managers to recruit applicants. LinkedIn is not only a resourceful tool for finding appropriate jobs, but is also a ready-made tool for companies to hank-pick their candidates of choice.
Online infographics and portfolios: Visual representation of data has a stronger impact as opposed to information written in black and blue. A video watched on youtube has a long-lasting impression as compared to reading an excerpt in the newspaper. The same goes for a resume as well.
Highlighting your skills and achievements will the help of images and visuals makes your resume dynamic and more engaging to the public. It is colorful, precise, has less amounts of text, and is hence more accessible and quite an interesting read.
The tools usually employed in this regard are photos, charts, images, graphs, icons, and any other graphical tools to provide maximum information neatly and effectively. Such infographics can be pinned on Pinterest where they can be accessed by hiring managers. The illustrations used here convey all the relevant information that is mentioned in every traditional resume as well.
For people working in the media department like photographers and designers, an online portfolio of all their consolidated work is a great way of showcasing their talent and creativity. The URL of the portfolio can be added to your conventional resume, attached to your LinkedIn profile, or uploaded on any other social media website. Several foreign universities prefer to see a visually detailed resume as compared to a documented email.
Videos: This is a highly innovative way of depicting your skill-set. All you need to do is sit in front of a camera and talk about your achievements and qualifications for about 2 – 5 minutes. Highly effective, this method of representation helps the recruiter to judge your level of confidence, communication skills, and body language beforehand; an exercise which is usually undertaken at the time of personal interview.
Candidates today have become exceedingly creative, and as such are including infographics and music to their video resumes. Quite brief and quirky, this category is usually accompanied with a written traditional resume.
Personalized websites and blogs: This technique has become quite popular recently. Individuals with a strong work history or the ones with numerous accomplishments are creating personal websites which can be easily linked to all the available social media portals. These websites provide an in-depth view of the candidate’s personality through the perusal of their online profiles, portfolios, videos, social posts and updates. It is but a unique blend of virtual and textual faculties which helps in standing out amongst several applicants.
Conclusion
Conducting an effective job search and also having the right resume surely helps in landing an opportunity of choice. Looking for employment is stressful and can be irksome to even the best of us. Presenting yourself appropriately and effectively in the first go works miraculously in establishing a good first impression, and helps in alleviating the vagaries of the following steps.
Author Bio: Tina Jindal is a professional content writer who works on a variety of topics like employment, real estate, and education. She has been involved with renowned publications and has tried her hand at editing works on Cookery, Gardening, Pregnancy, and Healthcare. She loves to travel and is crazy about dogs. You can contact her at and google.com/+TinaJindal.
