Time and again I have blogged the tips and tricks of how by following some simple guidelines job seekers can become employable, freshers and experienced alike. In the spirit of providing even more precise information I am starting a series of checklists that a job seeker can consult and get a competitive edge over others and stand out. I will try to cover all topics from creating resume to closing the deal. I will try to be as concise as possible but will provide explanations wherever needed. So here we go. My comments in italics.

• Is the format of the file standard and will open on all devices and platforms uniformly? I personally prefer pdf but a neatly formatted word doc is good too.
• Is the name of the file sensible and descriptive and “not stupid_”? Never send “new_resume(3).doc” to anyone. Always prefer “{Yourname}-resume.pdf” ex ‘Akhil Gupta – Resume.pdf’_.
• Is the formatting of resume uniform? Use fonts, font sizes and colors uniformly. Comic Sans MS is a strict no-no.
• The images (if any) in the résumé are not skewed.
• Do I need an “objective” in my résumé? If yes, is it unique? Do I know what it means and will I be able to repeat it if I am asked to? I always ask an interviewee the objective and have never found anyone who remembered.
• Are my educational qualifications clearly mentioned? Never try to hide/obscure your educational details even if you did not score very well.
• Are the details in a proper chronological order? I have seen resumes with last job at the end. Always mention everything latest-first.
• Am I highlighting my past projects clearly?  Mention clearly the team size, your position and role in the résumé. Rest of the details will be asked in the interview, if needed.
• I am not including any useless past achievements. No, the fact that you came 2^nd in a recital contest in class 7 does not impress me enough to hire you as a developer.
• I am not using any generic hobbies. Don’t stop at “listening to music and reading books”. Specialize. Find a genre. And no, surfing the web is not a hobby.
• My contact details are clearly mentioned? Also please get a separate email id but don’t send me [email protected]
• Last and most important – I have run a spell check on the file and have taken care of every squiggly little red underline before sending it over.
  That’s about it when it comes to building a résumé. There are a lot of resources on the internet which can help you a great resume but if you at least follow these steps you will avoid getting rejected at a lot of places just because your résumé had a silly mistake. In the next post of this series I will discuss the checklist for the email that you send to recruiters/employers. In case you feel anything else can be added to this list please mention the same in the comments box below or catch me on twitter at @akhilrex

This is a fast world we live in. This is a tough world. One has to be alert all the time to respond to all the hardships that the world throws at us. In all this work and effort and the struggle we tend to convert ourselves into fortresses so that no harm can come to us. But unfortunately most of the times these walls that we created to protect us stop the positivity from outside from reaching us as well. And whatever positivity we have within the walls keeps getting depleted. So what can be done to fix that? I say let’s smuggle some positive energy into our lives. I have a few tricks that I use to accomplish this and I am happy to share them.

Use positive words / Avoid negative words – This one is highly effective and I have been using this for some time. Try to use negative words as little as possible. Instead of saying “bad” you can say “not good” and maybe later replace that with “can be better”. I am all for calling a spade a spade but this way a lot of negative words are removed from our daily lives. Elimination of negativity helps in positivity to come to you. Please note that I am not asking you to use euphemisms but to deliberately try to not use negative words. Although saying cold hard “NO” to bad influences is an exception.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, one of the best prime ministers India has even seen used to write a poem on his every birthday. He is a great poet and if you can read Hindi poetry you much try his works. Not I am not Atal Bihari nor am I a poet but last time I wrote a post on my birthday where I introspected and shared the lessons that year had brought to me. As I turn 27 today it would only make sense to continue this tradition and try to keep doing it as long as I can. I’ll be honest that this year was not as eventful as the last one was but it brought with it not great lessons and memories nonetheless. Also a lot of the lessons from last year were reaffirmed this time.  Some of the new learnings this year brought with it are

Fight for what you love – Love is not a small thing and should not be taken lightly. If you claim to love something you should not just be working for it, taking care of it but you should be ready to fight anything for it. It does not matter what it is but if you love something you have to give it your 100%. Life is too short for taking important things for granted.

I love to talk. There I said it. I like to talk to people, friends, family and everyone. I actively seek opportunities where I can speak with many new people and increase my circle of influence. Recently someone asked me how I speak in public the way I speak and how they could also get better at speaking with people. Now I did not have any specific tip or trick for that person at that point other than “you get a hang of it once you do it a couple of dozen times” but when I look back there are a lot of things that I did (and still do) that have helped me become a better speaker over the years. I think a lot of people can benefit from there very small but extremely helpful details and get better at speaking in public

Talk to strangers – You get to meet a lot of new people every day. It could be during the commute to work, at work or at a social gathering. Try to strike up a conversation with them. More importantly try to carry this conversation by fueling it with new ideas and giving it direction. You will meet different kinds of people in this process and getting to know these many people would give you the confidence to face a bunch of strangers when you have your public speaking engagement. On the plus side, everyone in the world is living a very interesting life. It would be fun to listen to their stories. So next time you are on a bus or train with someone strike a conversation and see where it goes. Fortunately for me dealing with so many different kinds of clients and entrepreneurs acts a great platform.

We all have some ‘must carry’ items in our lives. Some items like laptop, phone, wallet etc. are applicable for almost everyone but there are some things unique to everyone that they always like to carry with them. Those could be anything from mundane everyday items to something extremely specific and these things are a great indicator of the kind of person you are. Here are 4 items that I always carry with myself in my bag with reasons about why I carry them

A pair of good earphones – Even if I don’t use it often I always make sure that my phone is loaded with my favorite music. I use music for a lot of things apart from just entertainment. It gets me up when I am low, helps me think and realize the more complex concepts of life. So it is important that I always have my earplugs when I need them. Using them I can make any place my safe/happy place.

The ultimate goal for anything and everything that we do is to be happy. The entire human race fights with life every single day to find happiness. Or at least for what we believe would be the means to happiness. We run after material gains, social stature and anything that we think we need to be happy. What really surprises me that even though everyone is working just to be happy, still there is so much sorrow in the world? Every man is constantly pursuing happiness and yet he is able to find sorrow which he is not even looking for. I know in the cycle of life bad times are bound to come. And sometimes they tend to stay for long and that would naturally make one sad. But being sad and quitting happiness are two very different things and quitting on happiness is the worst thing that one could do. Sorrow is a very powerful emotion it is very easy for us to be influenced with the smallest amount of sadness. Now I cannot tell you where to find happiness for I believe all the happiness that you need is within you only. In the bad times it is just pushed to the back of our minds by the sorrow and tensions that take the lead. It is not lost or destroyed but just hidden. And it is easy to assume something hidden from our sight to be lost. I am not a spiritual guru or an enlightened mind who will bestow on you eternal happiness or the meaning of life. What I am is someone who has experienced sorrow and I can share with you what I do to get past the sadness and find the happiness that is hidden deep within.

All bad times come to an end – It is easy to believe that the bad times stretch for eternity and the good times just vanish very fast but that actually is not true. Life is nothing but a series of random events that take place one after another governed by the probabilities that are defined by your past. What this means is that no longer how long a phase lasts or what kind it is, it will come to an end. Good times will succeed the bad times and to look forward to those good times is enough to give you hope.

Many people like to think of their dads as heroes. I don’t. I don’t think it would be fair for me to even try to compare any superhero with my dad. You see, even superheroes have weaknesses. Superman has kryptonite and the red sun, Batman is only human and things like that. My dad on the other hand is invincible. He is the perfect balance of love and restraint that cannot be compared to anyone. I see my dad as a goal. He is the ultimate aim of my life and anything that I do or do not do is a desperate attempt at being like him. I know that if I succeed in becoming anything like him I will be happy in life. I will be able to have a happy family and provide my kids with the best of opportunities under the sun. I realize that it is a tough route and it is going to take a lot of effort but looking at him I know it would be worth it.

Happy Birthday Dad

I know, I know. Yes he is probably the greatest villain of all time and yes your geek blood is boiling at the mere mention that Vader is not good at something that you wish to kick my behind all the way to tatooine. But trust me it hurts me even more that there are some of the characteristics of the dark lord that would have made sure that he failed as an entrepreneur. Let me try to show you how

• Vader was not a team player and curbed creativity- Entrepreneurship is not just about doing all the good work yourself. It is also about encouraging your employees and teammates to do good work by using incentives and positive reinforcements. If your employees work under the constant threat of being force choked for not doing exactly as you asked them, how will they be creative and forthcoming?

• Vader was not willing to pivot - The first death star was a humongous failure. Anyone would have realized that once they got to know how easy it was for Luke to blow it up. At that point instead of coming up with a new and more evil master plan or death device he started work on the “second death star”. We all know how it ended for him.

• He was overly influenced by investors – In almost the entire series he let Lord Palpatine dictate the rules of the game. He always neglected any suggestions that Vader gave and Vader, even when he was Anakin, was never free to take calls on important matters. It is good to have an investor who brings capital and experience (in this case the dark side of the force) but you should not let your investors dictate the rules of your venture.

• Vader was rattled easily – It did not take much for Anakin to assume that Obi-wan and Padme had turned against him. Similarly he was very easily influenced by Luke and turned against the dark side. At this point it is not about the right or the wrong (dark) side. It is about sticking to your guns (light sabre whatever). Even if he is wrong, an entrepreneur does not change sides easily.
  Clearly Darth Vader lacked a lot of qualities that an entrepreneur should have.  But all is not bad here. Assuming that he somehow overcame the issues mentioned above there are some qualities that would have made him a kick ass entrepreneur. (My heart did not allow me to leave this the post with only shortcomings of the dark lord)

• Great at prioritizing – He understood the importance of prioritizing and value of time. He did not mind outsourcing some work when he had something important in his hands.  He know that getting the death star up and running was the first priority so he simply outsourced the job of finding Han Solo to Boba Fett.

• Amazing Branding- Even if you don’t know who he is and what he does, one look at him and you know he means business and that too not the good kind. He is the ultimate poster boy of evil and if ever there becomes an association of evil villains he will give a hard time to Sauron and Agent Smith to become its president.
  Note: If you have not watched the Star Wars yet, stop wasting time and go watch .

There she was. He couldn’t stop looking at her. He was happy and surprised and happy. Though they had known each other since they were kids its been long since they saw each other. “She should be mine’, he thought. Blink. They have been together for 6 years. He is still happy and surprised and happy.

Note: Call it fate, destiny or luck this one came out to be 55 words in the first attempt only

It’s hiring season in Green Apple Solutions and like every time these are very exciting times. As a policy we prefer to hire freshers only. There is an elaborate theory behind doing this which I shall share some other time but the short reason is that freshers are fast learners and that is extremely important for a company like us where new technologies are adopted as soon as they are available. Every day many candidates appear for interviews for various profiles. Most of them are usually engineers for their “analytical” skills. I feel very bad when I say this but only less than 30% of them are actually employable and this is a very optimistic number. It is very easy to become an engineer in India due to the abundance and omnipresence of engineering colleges and almost everyone who comes out of school with sciences as their majors get a B.Tech. Parents becomes a part of this rat race or peer pressure and get their kids into engineering colleges without considering the future options or even the aptitude of the child. The result is as we see a deluge of unemployed unemployable graduates with an engineering degree and no knowledge of any sorts. Anyways, this post is not meant to discuss the faults in the system or parenting or anything else but more about how engineering students and graduates can become employable. It has been a long time since I wrote as an employer (this is the last post) but trust me these are very simple steps that you can follow and if followed correctly will definitely get you a job. In a sea of aspirants if you are different you will stand out and that will get you hired. Being different will get the job done for you.

• Drop your ego, wake up and smell the coffee: I will be brutally honest here. If you are not studying in the top 50 colleges in India (IITs etc) you will most likely not get placed. There could be many reasons for the same, most prominent one being not getting the opportunity at all. You need to realize this as soon as possible and start working to trying to get past this disadvantage. Most of the students just coast through the 4 years of college simply assuming that something will happen when they graduate. Well, it doesn’t. The first and most important step towards fixing the situation would be accepting it. Then only can you do anything to fix it. You need to accept that just because you have completed a degree, it does not entitle you to a job.
• Be ready to pivot: Maybe pivot is not the right term here but being an entrepreneur this is the term that comes naturally to me. You need to be clear about what you are going to do once you pass out. Do you wish to stay and try for employment in your core field or are you already planning to try to get into IT or some other field. Even if you are rigid about your choice you should be ready to switch/pivot in future for when things do not work out as you planned. If you are thinking of doing MBA then you may stop reading this post, bookmark it and come back to it when you are about to graduate from your management school. Chances are if you are not employable now, an MBA is not going to change that and the points that I am going to discuss next apply even to unemployable MBAs.
• Try to score well: Let me start by saying that it is very less likely that you will ever be able to actually use the knowledge that you gained in college. Having said that I still recommend you to score well in your degree exams just so you don’t get filtered out at the first stage of screening. Almost all companies will look at your resumes before you are called for an interview and with low scores you are very less likely to be called.
• Build skills, learn something: Most of the resumes that come in my hands are usually inflated with bogus or useless projects what are of zero inherent value for the applicant or the employer. Most of these are parts of compulsory training modules which are to be honest, utterly useless. Some of them are certifications from various random institutes which have no value in terms of usefulness. Instead of doing all this try to cultivate some skills which could be leveraged later. If you want to stay in your core field, pick a subject/topic of your field and become an expert in that. Everyone around you is a jack of all trades and to be different you need to be the master of at least one. If you wish to move to IT after graduating then start working towards it. Learn any programming language, understand the OOP concepts and try to build something. If you come to me with a programming project even if it is small, I will be impressed. It pains me dearly to see a graduate sitting in front of me who knows nothing even though the résumé is full of educational accolades. Stop running after certificates. learn something real.
• Get a real hobby: “Surfing internet” is not a hobby. At least with the advent of Facebook it no longer is. You need to think beyond “listening music, reading books, surfing net”. Not that there is any harm in listening to music or reading books but you need to specialize in something. No employer is every going to count spending time on Facebook as a self-improving activity. All of us are able to like, learn and cultivate one skill or the other so why not do it. Today I met a girl whose hobby is Madhubani Paintings. Not only is it unique, it gave her an advantage when she first intrigued and then educated me about the same. Unless you are applying for something genuinely mundane, everyone wants to hire passionate people only.
• Fix your resume: Your résumé is broken. I have not yet looked at it and I know it is broken. The reason this is so is because I know that your résumé is not original. Most likely you took the résumé of a friend or a senior and just changed the personal information. I talked about this in detail in one of my previous posts. Maybe you do not realize it but if in a stack (pile) all the resumes look alike, what are the chances that yours will even be considered. You need to fix your résumé. From the filename to fonts to the content. Everything.
• Please come prepared: If you come unprepared for an interview in any way, be it your attire, your outlook or your punctuality the only message I get from this is that you are not genuinely interested in getting this job. So some research about the company where you are going, be aware of the profile you are applying for and prepare yourself accordingly. Almost all interviews contain some trivial questions and if you can’t even answer those then it really shows you are not serious. I always start with “Tell me something about yourself” and usually the answer to this question alone tells me if the candidate needs to be considered or not. Also please come dresses nicely.
• Stay confident and persistent: It is very easy to be tempted to quit after a few failures. It is understandable that failure get to you in a way most situations don’t. It breaks your confidence and fills you up with a lot of doubt. It adds a lot of pressure which in turn harm you. Let me tell you a little secret. There is no shortage of jobs in the industry. You just have to become the right (or even just OK) candidate. Try to stay confident. And persevere.
  I am sure that most of you might already be aware of, if not all, a lot of these things but the most of you don’t realize the importance of these points. And difference between knowing and realizing is what the entire employability is all about. Although I am writing this post to help you, the aspiring engineering student or graduate, you can really help me and employers like me by actually paying heed to these points.