Balemarthy Vamsi Krishna

Consider writing resume as writing your auto-biography but for only your professional life. Nevertheless, maintain the impact of your values, dreams, aspirations in that. Use storytelling - Try to tell about you, your work, your project to a non-technical person. Once this text is ready and starts making sense to other person you are 80% done. Start replacing the generic words in the text with the keywords as per JD or company. Re-iterate this step for every section of the resume and you will see that your resume will speak exactly about you and exactly like you. The next steps of process in job search purely becomes steps to validate these.

Usage of resume keywords for branding should follow the trajectory of Values -> aspirations -> actions -> results. 1.What are your core values? 2. What will they help you achieve? 3. How do you want to achieve them? 4.What are the results you expect. Without this process one can't decide and achieve correct placement of keywords and that will backfire. The various places in the resume this continuum can be maintained are 1. Career summary - here you can speak about your key skills, aspirations using power adjectives, verbs from the keywords. 2. Hard skills - Many times these are Pure keywords 3. Projects - We can maintain high keyword density here by using them consistently in the explanation of projects.

One word or few words answer - Because people use them to search. Keywords are so vital like they are like our body vitals. They help to decide if we are healthy or sick. Resume keywords are similar. They tell whether the resume will make the cut or enter into a digital rabbit hole. Keywords are also those strong bonds that unite your accomplishments with the job description. One word of caution though is that - we should not cook the keywords rather use them. Create recipe from ingredients but do not tamper with ingredients. It is called adulteration. Follow these - Create write up of your strengths, weaknesses, current work description. Match make these with JD using relevant key words and you are done. Not satisfied. Iterate the same.

Proof reading of resumes and cover letter is very crucial for these 3 important factors - Eliminating grammatical and bad sentence structures which is direct benefit - With proof reading we are giving time to ourselves be in the reader's place and understand how the document is seen. This place a crucial role. This is like reading the mail drafted once before we click the send button. - When the documents are read with intention in mind, the gaps will automatically get uncovered. The gap could be something related to resume and JD. Hence I would say keeping the JD also handy while proof reading resume is good option. Resume is our single and important marketing brochure and we want it to truly speak about us.

Being from technical and programming background and now dealing with early career, I sometimes feel there should be some "Writing guidelines" for resumes like coding guidelines. They should not be rigid but definitely unmutable if agreed after lot of thought process. There should also be a valid strong reason why a rule has be broken or not followed. Font size, style, organization of sections, indentation, areas to be underlined, flow of statements, common and good writing patterns that are not poetic but are considered good English should be followed. Resumes definitely can't be autobiographies but should definitely be a trailer of the candidate.

Resume can speak in a story telling tone, the accomplishments that were done by us. Also these accomplishments can be fine tuned as per the job description. On the other hand, cover letter can describe more about our values that are more constant and less dependent on the kind of the company and role. For example, if being individualistic is one the traits then that trait can be explained in a better fashion in cover letter. The same trait can be displayed using projects in the resume. Obviously cover letter has no overhead of ATS compliant circus and can be more free flowing. They are also targeted directly for human consumption and not machine. Cover letter should connect resume and can contain company specific targeting sometimes.