It turns out that she did not expect such a trying process. I don’t blame her. But, the beauty of hard work and a touch of pain is that learnings from such experiences are always incredibly deep. And I thought I’d share some of her big learnings from the experience. The beauty with the depth of these lessons is that they apply everywhere and in that lies another deep underlying principle. If we go deep enough i.e. if we truly understand the nature of what we do in any field, we will extract incredibly meaningful lessons that can be applied everywhere.
Note: This is a very talented person who manages a couple of great blogs. She also tends to be very kind with her compliments.
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Every time I sent him a version he’d send it back to me with improvements. The fact that it was scanned and remarked on with a pencil somehow hammered the suggestions deep into my head. We went through a week of 10-12 cycles of review and in the end came out my resume. Something I am immensely proud of now!
1) Patience – I learnt the importance of waiting for things to shape-up. I am a very distracted person. It takes great love for work and motivation to keep myself at it. I always hurry thing up in the end. This time though, I waited for it. I learnt to go along with it and realize the wonderful journey/outcome. Also, from my friend. He was extremely patient with me that one week! With all the corporate relationships he is used to, I thought it was really encouraging when he waited for me to learn. Very grateful for that!
2) While ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’, the master cook can always handle the broth taking all the suggestions of the other cooks – I have always been better at working by myself, doing my thing. This time though I worked with three other people! Initially I took every bit of advice and blindly changed things on the document. As the reviews increased though I learnt to negotiate. To decide which I wanted to change, which I dint. If I had done this all by myself, I know that it would have remained Dhanya_Resume_v1.pdf. This is actually my biggest learning I would say. I learnt the importance of discussion and team work, in a way.
3) To each his own – Just like every person has a unique fingerprint, every person has a unique view/opinion on things. I could see how each one of us noticed various aspects of the document. How we saw the words. What the words meant to us. This was a very deep learning. Having such varied opinion on things, I wonder how we even manage to run things in the world this way. I guess thats where compromise comes in.
4) Sweat on details – Every space, every comma, every dot, matters. An achievement may not seem big to me in relativity, while on the contrary it might be something big to someone else’e eyes. It is essential to analyze a detail from the hirer’s point of view and to try judging their understanding.
5) Easy on the eye, faster to the head – Formatting anything and making it cohesive makes life so much better. Personally, I like to keep things ordered and clean. I realized its important to extend it to every inch of life!
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The original post is here.
Thanks to having given a fair few ‘resume writing’ workshops, I do read a lot into the thought put in a resume. It doesn’t mean mine is anywhere close to perfect but a lot of effort has gone into it. I’ve been fortunate to gain lot of this experience thanks to RealAcad and other experienced friends who helped me along the way.
So, when you write/edit your resume for the next round, do make sure that you run it through people who can help you. Preparing a great resume, in my very limited experience, does take 9-10 versions and a fair amount of thought to get right.
It’s well worth the effort though. If you still have a niggling feeling about your resume after having bounced it off with people around you and would like more help, do feel free to reach out. :)
A Learning a Day 