Tips to increase resume shortlisting

Your job application is your one chance to grab the attention of the hiring manager. Are you using this one opportunity to get a face time with the hiring manager ?

In this article in Economic Times, according to the Indian Staffing Federation (ISF), the Indian IT and ITes industry intends to hire?8,00,000-10,00,000 people by the?end of 2023.

While the number of jobs seem to be plenty, the hiring manager and the recruiters will be spending a lot of their time screening the resumes for a good match. Many companies are adopting Ai based resume matching solutions as well. We at Vinz Global use some internal systems along with human intervention to match the candidate CV against the job description for select/no-select decisions.

It is challenge for the candidate as well as the recruiting team to adjust to varying formats of the resumes. Some of the systems at least have taken a step to parse any type of resume and create a standard format resume for internal use. These parsers have come a long way and do a pretty good job of retaining all the original content and putting them under proper sections of the parsed format.

According to this article, on Zety.com,

• On average, each corporate job offer attracts 250 resumes. Of those candidates, 4 to 6 will get called for an interview
• 1 in 6 candidates who applied for a job were asked for an interview
• Recruiters take an average of 6 seconds to scan a resume.

As a hiring manager, having worked in the IT industry for 30 odd years, I spend very less time looking at the summary information on a CV. I focus on the projects done by the individuals. I believe, this is where the candidate has an opportunity to demonstrate and market his/her skills, articulating what was done, which skills were used, how it helped the project, what learnings came out of the project, and how the job specific skills were used to solve a business problem. Many CVs explain what the "team" did on a project, which makes it more difficult to ascertain what the job applicant did on the project. I am assuming, this is true with many hiring managers.

What I have seen in most of the resumes is, the project description is very detailed, explaining what the project is about, but, not explaining what the individual has done on the project.

When applying, it is recommended to check what the job requirements are and what experience levels are being asked for. I would recommend the job aspirants to take some time to revisit their resumes and look at structuring their CVs better, with following suggestions

Under each project, explain

• What role did you play in the team ?
• What did you actually work on ?
• How did you use your skill on the project ?
• What business problem did you solve with the technology ?
• What methodology did you use to deliver the solution?
• Do you have any statistics to provide - Number of defects fixed, Number of story points delivered, Lines of code developed, Number of manual test cases converted to automation per day, Efforts spent in delivery etc.

I have provided an example to explain how a project explanation should be added in a resume (or CV).

Project : Migration of a Fortran PoS system to Client Server based VB/SQL Server System

Worked on a large migration project as a Full stack developer. I was part of an 8 member dev team and was responsible for the End of Day (Eod) reconciliation module implementation within this large migration project.

For the EOD reconciliation module,

• Designed the SQL Server tables to extract, transform and load revenue transactions, inventory transactions, and sales transactions from 5000+ stores. This was done over a course of 3 months, involving designing, developing, testing, training, and productionalizing the system
• Developed complex SQL Server stored procedures for handling the data coming 5000+ stores, applying business rules for Top selling products by Qty, Top Revenue generating Products by Revenue, etc.
• Designed Visual Basic front end for store managers, which helped them to key in the end of day summary transaction details, which were matched with the store level back office data for reconciliation. This involved interacting with the store managers to learn about their daily activity and design the system to fit into their keyboard centric user experience.
• The EoD module was a complex due to the number of stores involved and the time zones of East, Central and West, where in I had to ensure that each time zone files are processed correctly and the system recovered itself from any faults or breaks due to junk data coming into the processing stage.
• Developed design document for the EoD process, created User Manual for the store users, helped new team members to understand the overall scope of the migration project and assisted in setting up their dev environment.
• Explored Waterfall methodology and worked with the lead to implement well documented SDLC process
• Setup Visual Source Safe and defined code management process for the team
• The EoD process helped the business get the top performing inventory at the store level and make decisions on which items to be sent to the stores from the warehouses for the upcoming shipments

It would be great if the job aspirants explain their skills in association with a project, the way I have explained above. When you have worked so hard on your project and have gained an experience, why not flaunt it correctly on your resume and make the resume speak for your expertise ?

Would be great to hear any success stories, after trying the recommendation.