Job Hunt 101 - Doc Prep - Resume How To?

The resume must be able to land you interview calls. Your resume must successfully be able to navigate through
  1. Recruiters, consultants
  2. Human Resource
  3. Hiring Manager
  4. Technical Team
I know you will ace the technical rounds if you are able to get through the hierarchy of recruiters, HR people etc. Your resume must help you climb this ladder. 

You can have an aesthetically pleasing resume/CV which does not have a lot of information on them but is very neat. This can help you with an academic position but in the industry, you are one amongst the million talented people who can get the job done. Here an aesthetically pleasing resume wont be able to help you. 

Your resume must have a lot of data. This data must be able to satisfy the requirements of the Recruiters, must poke the interest of the HR and must show your accomplishments to the technical people who are going to be interviewing you. 

Recruiters, Human Resource - 
Most recruiters are not going to be domain experts. The most probably dont understand what you have written in your resume. They might not even read it fully. They decide to continue/reject your application by doing a search for important terms required for the job. So being data intensive is good. Including the right keywords in your resume is the best way to navigate this course.
Case in point, I found a job that seemed perfect for my qualifications but it got rejected at this level because they were not able to find an obscure acronym they were looking. I had not added it because it seemed too general and thought by looking at my work, they will realize that I was THE guy they wanted. Sadly they did not understand what I had written which is understandable since they are not working in my domain. I included the keyword and got selected for next round. 

Hiring Manager, Technical People
Being data intensive is good but being repetitive is not. When actual technical people read your resume, they would like to see results, problems solved, improvements and not just obscure terms and tools. 

Here I am describing a format that will help you achieve these results. 
  1. Format
    1. Name, contact phone number, address - Important so that people will be able to contact you
    2. Objective statement 
    3. work experience, chronological order starting with latest experince
    4. Education, chronological order starting with highest degree
    5. Software/Tools/Hardware skills
    6. Publications
    7. Certifications
    8. Achievements
    9. Reference
    10. Blog list - work sample
Name, Contact phone number, address - Mail Address, Phone number so that people will be able to contact you

Objective Statement - A concise statement that clearly states what industry you are targeting and what your objective is. Sample objective statement - "To secure a position with a leading semiconductor organization, that will enable me to use my strong
engineering skills and education background and ability to work well with people". 
Sample objective statements can be found here - http://jobsearch.about.com/od/sampleresumes/a/sampleobjective.htm

Work Experience 
Recruiters are going to look if you have experience in the job you are applying. So list your experience in chronological order with the latest experience on top. A title and description are in order for each position you held.
  • Title:  
    • You have to mention your designation, 
    • company you work for and 
    • your start and end dates, to quantify your experience. 
    • Ex - DFT Engineer, New York University ,08/2010 - 06/2013
  • Description: After you mention these details, you need to describe the work you have been doing in that company. You will have worked on a number of projects, you should include a description for each of these projects. You can follow the CART rule when describing your work. 
    • Cause - The problem you worked on
    • Action - What you did to address the problem
    • Result -  Quantifiable improvements you achieved. USE NUMBERS TO SHOW RESULTS.
    • Tools used  
    • Example - Design for Testability hardware to improve Small Delay Defect coverage: Designed DfT hardware, developed placement algorithm that improves small delay defect coverage from 80% to 94%. Static and statistical timing analysis, timing closure was done, C and Perl was used. 
  • Notes
    • Make sure you mention tools used in the description, Recruiters recruit for a large number of positions and you cannot expect them to be knowledgeable in your domain. Most often the do not know understand your significant accomplishments. They search for tools and key words in your resume. Make sure you identify important key words pertaining to your domain and include them in your description. For example in the above statement I have used DfT, Static Timing Analysis, Timing closure, C and Perl which are highly searched keywords in my domain. 
    • It is not possible to include all the tools, 3 letter acronyms you have worked with into your resume. I suggest you have one line in the end of your description where you can add tools, acronyms that you are familiar with and mentioned in the job description. You modify this line to include important key terms mentioned in the job description. Presence of these key terms satisfies the recruiters enough to forward your resume to the next stage in the pipeline. Ex - Knowledge in interfaces PCI, PCIe, Ethernet and USB, Have used logic analyzer, oscilloscopes, multimeter. Note keywords PCI PCIe have been added because it is required in the job description and I have worked with them.
Education
List your education in chronological order starting with highest degree on top. If you have a PhD, Masters or Bachelors, you do not have to include school information. Mention the 
  • Degree,
  • Major 
  • University, 
  • Graduation year, 
  • GPA - mention only if high. If you feel it is low, dont mention it. 
  • Ex - Master of Science, Computer Engineering, NYU Poly, 2013, 3.76
Software/ Hardware Skills
Make sure you mention the tools you have used and familiar with. Make this list as comprehensive as possible because recruiters are going to be searching for specific tools which you might have used. If you have it there, chances are that he will forward your resume

Publications
  • List your publications in chronological order. 
  • Include the ones you have submitted and waiting for results, mention that it has been submitted. 
  • Do not include work in progress.
  • Format
    • Authors - some one might know your co-authors,
    • Name of the paper,
    • Conference to which it is submitted to
    • Year of publication 
  • Ex - Abishek Ramdas, Samah Saeed, Ozgur Sinanoglu. Design-for-Testability for Small Delay Defects. International Testing Conference, 2013, Submitted.
  • If you have submitted a Thesis, include the thesis in a separate section.
Certifications
  • List in chronological order
  • Certificate name
  • Entity issuing the certificate
  • Certificate number if applicable 
  • Ex - Nanoelectronics, Atomic Force Microscopy, Nanoscale Transistors, Purdue University, USA.
Achievements
  • Include affiliations, memberships - Ex Affiliated to IEEE
  • In achievements involving competition, express your rank as compared to total number of competitors in a competition
  • Ex - Ranked 376 from over 1,50,000 engineers in All India Graduate Aptitude Test for Electrical Engineers.
Blog
  • Include the web address of your blog, make sure you create an hyperlink 

Important Check List
  • Do not make your resume sound repetitive, do not include same information in different sections. 
  • No spelling and grammar mistakes. Do a spell check
  • Before sending out your resume make sure you look at the job description and add term, tools, 3 letter acronyms you feel important, to the extra line mentioned earlier.
  • The case is that you might be traveling around when searching for a job. Have a separate resume for different locations and send a resume that is closest to the job location.
  • You need your resume in doc and text format. Having it in PDF format makes it less searchable is what I hear. So uploading it in either doc format or text format is better for computerized searching of your resume.

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