Part II: Someone please, hunt my head!

Read (Part I) here

(This article was earlier published on Dawn’s Blogs: http://www.dawn.com/2011/07/27/how-to-get-hunted-down.html)

Here is the anti-climax. You don’t. You cannot possibly calculate your chances of being in category C, I learnt it the hard way. But thankgod for estimation. Here is how you ensure that you are doing at least as well as others, that you are aware what they are doing and that you are pushing the limits; putting yourself out there like a qualified (but desperate) individual screaming pick me, pick me, pick me…

Say no to isolation: Very early on in my post-graduation days, the only two people who had seen my resume was me and my first interviewer. I was shy: I felt I was not qualified enough, not experienced enough, not good enough. Ironically, I was not getting calls for interviews because my resume was just not visible enough, (in more ways than one).

 So Share. Share with your career services office, your friends and your peers. Ask for advice, feedback and above all, criticism. Go on the internet, read professional blogs and join forums, see formats, styles, patterns. Evaluate your resume with respects to others you come across and be ready to change.

 Think like a Marketeer. Sell yourself! No one has the time or the energy to read a long resume. What you write first will be seen first and in most cases will be the only thing seen or read so put your best on display.

 a) The ‘objective’ in relation to what the employer is looking for. The objective in a resume just like cover letters is case-sensitive. Change them with respect to the job title and job description and maintain relevance. I was a Mathematics major looking for a Corporate Communications job and that is the first question I was asked: What the Hell was I doing interviewing for this job? If you don’t know how to answer that question, maybe there is something wrong here. Be prepared to justify your resume.

 b) You are only as good as you look. Do not lie but do not be too honest either. Do not point them to your flaws. Let them figure your flaws out themselves. If you had a 2.2 GPA in university, please don’t write it unless they ask you for it.

 Originality is the art of concealing your sources: Maybe with your qualification and experience, you feel that you are more category B; stop, take this thought and bury it somewhere deep. You may not be the next big genius with amazing ideas but do not let anyone else know that. You just have to show them that you are. All over the world, ideas today are derived, extrapolated and induced from other ideas. I do not mean cheating or presenting someone else’s ideas as your own or plagiarizing, I just mean whatever you do, know what you ‘ought’ to be doing, saying or writing and how you ‘ought’ to be presenting yourself. Why an employer picks your resume or hires you over another is not because you are different. It is because you ‘appear’ different and he should not know one from another.

“The Social Network” was not just a movie; it was a lesson which taught us all just how much can power the social networking sites which have invaded the online space today have! Join Linkedin! Talk to alumni, recruiting experts, internship colleagues, see what they are doing., make connections, join forums, see which companies are listed, which you might be interested in and how they are hiring. If nothing else, you will be in touch with the market situation and be aware of job demands, hiring patterns and hiring requirements.

 And lastly,

Let others talk for you: If there is anything better than talking about yourself is having other more professional-sounding people talking about you. Ask for personalized references from credible sources who actually know you.

I wish getting a job was more of a quadratic equation with ‘real’ answers (pun intended) but it is not. Let us all find solace in the fact that the predators hunt until the preys are extinct. And we are not extinct, are we?

Part1: Someone please, hunt my head!

(This article was earlier published on Dawn’s Blogs: http://www.dawn.com/2011/07/27/how-to-get-hunted-down.html)

Disclaimer: This article has nothing to do with ‘head hunting’- the phenomenon. But somehow, somewhere it has to do with how to make yourself absolutely indispensable to the ’hunters’ in the job market. Go figure! 

Inspiration struck. It did at the most unlikely of timings. It was when I was getting a particularly long lecture from my sister (which inevitably turned into a fight) about the hazards of laziness and purposelessness of life. What was I doing with life? Where was the much needed direction? Graduation from a top-notch university is all well but what now? And bla and bla and bla… In situations like this, one retaliates, fights, gets annoyed and true to my cue, I did all of those. But much to my heart’s dismay, I realized she was absolutely right. What now?

Upon graduating from one of the best universities of Pakistan, one’s eyes twinkle at the thought of ‘high prospects’, ‘career ladder’, ‘corporate world’, ‘golden opportunities’, ‘high-ended challenges’. However, at the outset of a debilitating economy and a condensed job market, the world view of this twinkling eye becomes less shall we say, twinkly. Needless to say, the dreams remain dreams and you become just one of the unemployed graduates of a crumbling nation. You used to be a luxury good. People used to look at you in awe. Now you are just a normal good, your demand increasing only in proportions to the demander’s income which puts you in a bit of a fix because the demander’s income is decreasing. Alright, economics was never my forte, but you get the picture.

I did get a job but I want to dwell least on that. I want to talk about what happens when you have to start at the beginning and you are lost like Alice, down a rabbit hole.

Let us assume here that you are not starting your own business and you don’t have your dad’s friend sitting at the Managing Director position in an air-conditioned suite specially built for him at a multinational company; how do you get a job?

So you start at a good university- take 10 points. If it is a brilliant university- take 20. You dropped your CV at your career services office- take 5 more. You registered on naukrijunction, rozee.pk, bayt.com, chabee.com, a dozen others (who send you birthday wishes, I just discovered yesterday) – take 2 points, you actually made profiles on these websites- take 10 points, (If I could, I would give you a 100 points because it is really a hassle), you subscribed to their emails- take 1 point, you made a list of all the companies you ought to be applying to- take 1 point and then you proceeded to apply to all those places, by hook or by crook; online applications, resume uploads, cover letters, the works – take 50 points. Now that you have all these points, where are you?

And that is the ultimate question. You may be doing the things which bag you so many points but how do you know what you are up against?

Much like relative grading, consider yourself a candidate in competition with a million others, similar to you or not so similar to you, all appraised on a bell curve. Where do you fall on this curve and how do you get yourself to be in the most desirable category, category C. You may have all these cool points we just calculated above, but is that enough? And how do you know it is enough unless you know what ‘enough’ is?

Ofcourse, find out in Part II of this article.

Starting with Shakespeare

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing

William Shakespeare— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)

How I can desire inspiration and yet start with existentialism is a conundrum I am unable to solve yet. But these words give me a kind of hope that none others have before and hence, I start with them. I start at the end.