Have you sent your resume to n number of companies and still did not get an interview call? Did you manage to get an interview call but could not clear it? Let us try to understand what went wrong and how to avoid it in future.

We can broadly divide the entire process into three crucial factors i.e.

• A concise Resume
• Interview
• Your Personality

Even before talking about resume, it is important to spend some time in understanding what is the right job for you? Whether you would like to work for big companies or startups? Whether you prefer to work from home or work from the office. Are you at your best when you work alone or in a team? Whether you have any locational preferences? Are you ready to work in different time zones? Are you ready to work weekends? Considering your technical expertise, what are you good at? Once you have answered these questions then you can start applying to the relevant openings. Remember it is especially important to focus on what do you want than to explore what is available. This will really increase your chances of getting shortlisted and then finally landing on your dream job.

Once you make note of all these things which will help you find the right job for you, then you can start searching and applying for a job. Before you start sending out your resumes to potential employers you need to make sure your resume is good enough to communicate your capabilities. So how do you make sure your resume is good to go?

Considering you are applying for a large company which gets a high number of resumes, then the chances are that only 10% of the resumes received clear the first scan and go to the second round. So how do you make sure your resume does not get rejected in the first round itself?

• You need to make sure the resume is ATS or AI compliant. This is where your resume is directly fed into the software and the machine reads your resume and decides whether to shortlist or not.
• The chances of rejection are more when fed to machines as they will read the resume in a certain pattern. So, you need to make sure you are not using any infographics or other formats to make the resume look more beautiful. Hence keep it in plain text and you can use bullets.
• Even if a resume goes to a human reader usually called sourcer he or she will spend 2-3 seconds to decide whether to move it to next round or reject it.
• Thus keep your resume simple, easy to read by machines or humans.
• Next step is to make sure your resume is not very generic. You must revise every time you apply to a different posting. Make sure it is relevant for the job description.
• Then make sure you have all the relevant key words as per the job description.
• Highlight your certifications
• Do not make grammar mistakes. Now with so many inbuilt grammar correcting tools, it will look very awkward if your resume has many grammar mistakes.

Now that we have understood what mistakes to avoid in resume, it’s time to talk about facing the interview. Here are some tips which would work any IT job interview

• Most probably it will be online, in that case refer to our other article ‘Nailing Virtual Interviews’
• Prepare ahead for a few frequently asked questions like tell me about yourself. Practice answering it in front of friends or still better in front of a mirror. You can either audio or video record your responses, check them, and see what improvements are needed. This type of practice will make you answer these initial rounds of questions very confidently and create a positive image of yourself in front of the interviewer and will boost your morale.
• Try to be more focused and formulate your answers in such a way that it shows confidence. Do not beat around the bush.
• All the questions will be based on your profile and the job description, so you can lead the discussion the way you want.
• Remember that once you are shortlisted for an interview, they are there to select you and do not have the intention of rejecting you, so its your responsibility to show them how you can handle the challenges the job offer and to show them that you are the right fit.

We talked about resume and Interview, so imagine there is another candidate with similar skills and answers the questions as good as you, then what will differentiate you from him? It’s your personality. Hence it becomes important to show a cheerful outlook from the beginning. Highlight the volunteer work you have done. Study about the company and show them that you have done your homework. Do not miss any opportunity where you can show that your values match the culture or values of the organization to which you are applying. With all these in place nothing can stop you from acing your next interview. All the best.