How to impress Recruiters

Three Things Important In your resume

During your job search you will review hundreds of job postings. Some will be very well written and provide quality information, while others will tell you little about the employer's needs. The majority of them have a similar format and characteristics, and they provide insight into what the employer wants--if you know what to look for.

Postings can be written by a hiring manager or a recruiter, but it's usually the recruiter who receives and screens the applications. With this in mind you should be sure that your résumé will make a recruiter feel confident that you are qualified. By making the most of the insight you can glean from the following three sections of a typical job posting, you can better position yourself to impress recruiters and get interviews:

The job title: Every job posting includes a job title. It is often what first piques your interest in the posting, and it's the first thing the hiring manager thought of when he or she decided to create the position. Most job seekers overlook the intelligence the job title provides and suffer for it. The job title gives you the most likely keywords that will be used to find qualified candidates for the job, and because of that you can use it to your advantage.

At AttractJobsNOW.com we use the job title as our guide in creating effective customized résumés by ensuring that each candidate's summary statement and areas of expertise are in line with the job title. We ensure that the words in the job title appear prominently throughout the résumé, so that our clients will appear at the top of candidate searches. As a result, more than 95% of our candidates succeed in getting job interviews at their companies of interest.

Responsibilities: The responsibilities section describes what will be expected of the employee in the position. You'll often find that there are five to 10 bullet points in this section, but in our research with recruiters and hiring managers we've found that the first three responsibilities are the most important. Job postings are usually based on a primary business need to which additional responsibilities are added to create a full-time position. Your résumé should focus on your experience, results and accomplishments in the tasks outlined in the first three bullets in the responsibilities section. Also you'll find keywords in those first three bullets that recruiters will use in searching for qualified candidates.

Qualifications: The qualifications section provides insight into the experience, skills and education the hiring manager has in mind for the person they feel will be capable of excelling in the role. As in the responsibilities section, the first three qualifications are usually the most important. If you meet those top three qualifications, you should directly say so in the summary section at the top of your résumé, to instantly inform the hirer that you're qualified and to persuade them to read the rest of your résumé. If you don't meet the top three qualifications but have others strengths that qualify you to excel, definitely mention them in your summary section.

Taking the time to analyze job postings and customize your résumé based on their job titles, responsibilities and qualifications is often the difference between receiving interviews and being screened out of the recruiting process.

----Forbes

How Your Weekend Can Be Ruined

How Your Weekend Can Be Ruined

You were looking forward to the weekend after a week of early mornings. Every day you climbed out of bed at 5am thinking “just 4 more days…just 2 more days…”

And when your weekend is here, you think you can sleep in late (at least till 10, before the traffic picks up) but that’s not to be. At 6am sharp, the building next door starts drilling – LOUDLY. You bury your face in your pillow and try your best to shut the noise out.

But since it’s not your day, the cell phone trills right in your ear. It’s daddy dear wanting to know how the dinner went last night. You really want to tell him, “Dad I’ve got a slight hangover, I’d like to sleep, just for a bit more”. But you don’t, of course. You don’t want to give him a shock at 7am. Instead, you hang up promising to call him at a sane hour.

You barely reach your subconscious when the phone shrieks, again. It’s your friend saying the flat next door to theirs is empty, if you want to move in. You mumble incoherently and cut the call. All that and it’s not even 8am on a holiday!

Clearly the day isn’t going too good. So you decide you might as well wake up and watch some TV. How naive of you to think you could do that; don’t you know it’s not your day? As punishment for thinking that you could indulge in something like that, the always prompt Bangalore city’s electricity gods decide to black out your part of the city.

Ha. But there is a greater God above, and you pull out your laptop and connect with the world. Then again, it’s a tough battle between the invisible and intangible God in heaven and the omnipresent gods here on earth. And the latter is winning the battle as the battery of your laptop is blinking furiously, threatening to die out any minute. It has to happen just when you’re chatting with a friend you haven’t spoken to in years.

At 2% of battery remaining, the one above wins the war and lo, there’s light in the world! You switch on the TV- all riled up at the way things have been going so far. All you need now is some nice song that’ll lift your mood. And whaddya know, you get just the song you need.

ZERO RUPEE NOTE

Zero rupee note tackles India's corruption culture

An Indian lobby group has introduced a novel anti-corruption tool: the zero-rupee note that can be handed over to any crooked bureaucrat who seeks a little extra payment.

A zero rupee note: a protest note and anti-corruption tool produced by campaigning group 5th Pillar. Photo: AFP/Getty/HO

The protest note - literally worth only the paper it is printed on - is being promoted by 5th Pillar, a group that campaigns on behalf of ordinary Indians who are forced to grease the palms of millions of civil servants.Vijay Anand, head of 5th Pillar, said the bill, which looks similar to a real 50-rupee note, was first distributed to students in the southern state of Tamil Nadu to encourage them to reject India's "baksheesh" culture.

"The corruption prevailing in the common man's life is painful and it can be dealt with by the zero-rupee note," said Anand. Many Indians are resigned to having to pay extra for government services and to smooth daily transactions such as registering a birth, getting a driving licence or avoiding the attentions of an unscrupulous traffic officer.

But Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, has often spoken out against the damaging effect that bribes, extortion and fraud have on all levels of life, and said that the problem threatens India's economic prospects.

In its latest annual report Transparency International stated that each year almost four million poor Indian families had to bribe officials for access to basic public services.

In the same report, India slipped further in its corruption index from 72nd to 85th in a list of 180 countries.

Anand said the zero-rupee note, which was conceived by an Indian professor living in the United States, gave people the chance to register a grassroots protest against low-level corruption.

"We are confident it will change the way people think and act in the coming years," he said. The bill, which like all Indian notes is graced with a picture of independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, carries 5th Pillar's email address and phone number and the solemn vow "I promise to neither accept nor give a bribe".

Volunteers hand them out near places where officials are often on the look-out for a backhander, such as railway stations and government hospitals.

Though questions remain over whether it is legal to print the fake - if worthless - money, more than one million bills in five languages have been distributed.

Anand said they have even had a practical effect, often shaming officials into getting business done efficiently without using real cash.

"There has not been one incident where a zero-rupee note has created a more serious situation," said Anand.

Ravi Sundar, an IT recruiter in the southern city of Coimbatore, said he used the notes whenever he had government business to sort out.

He gave one example where a tax official refused to process documents unless he paid her 500 rupees.

"I handed over the zero-rupee note which I always keep in my pocket," said Sundar.

"She was afraid and didn't want to take it. She completed the job immediately and said she was sorry and asked me not to take it forward."

Parth J. Shah, president of the Centre for Civil Society think tank, said the root of the problem lay in state-run companies and their vast bureaucracies.

"Unless we remove monopolies and the kind of licensing system that we have in many areas of life to create more competition, we're unlikely to get rid of low-level corruption," he said.

Anand said he hoped to introduce the zero rupee note across India, but he insists he remains an optimist about human behaviour.

"We haven't given up on officials. There are honest ones in every department," he said.

How to Keep Your Customer Experience Efforts on Track

There's a good chance your company has responded to the recession with an increased commitment to providing an exceptional customer experience. Such efforts might address systemic issues like "poorly designed interactions, broken processes, outdated business rules, insufficient customer insight and cultures that are far from customer-centric," notes Bruce Temkin in a post at the Retail Customer Experience blog. And while some companies will succeed in this process in 2010, Temkin says, others may falter.

So he offers a few tips for keeping your team's customer-experience efforts on track. Among them:

Back up your stated goals with action. "[E]xecutives should either get actively involved in customer experience transformation or drop it from their agendas," he argues. His suggestion for the C-suite: "Develop a customer-experience dashboard and manage the results with the same energy that you manage financial results."

Don't give social-media insights more credit than they deserve. You can certainly learn about your customers—and address immediate concerns—with Twitter and Facebook, but that won't give you the entire story, he notes. "Other channels—like comments on surveys and calls into the call center—can often provide even richer insight."

View customer service as a strategic asset. Temkin reports that his research has found that customers actually want good customer service more than they want low prices. "But companies often treat customer service as an unwanted stepchild," he adds.

Don't take employee buy-in for granted. Your staff might embrace a change initiative without resistance, but you can't assume that will be the case, Temkin cautions. Make every staff member a part of the planning process, he advises.

SMILES :)

Spotted in a toilet of an office:

TOILET OUT OF ORDER. PLEASE USE FLOOR BELOW

In an office:

WOULD THE PERSON WHO TOOK THE STEP LADDER YESTERDAY

PLEASE BRING IT BACK OR FURTHER STEPS WILL BE TAKEN

In an office:

AFTER TEA BREAK STAFF SHOULD EMPTY THE TEAPOT

AND STAND UPSIDE DOWN ON THE DRAINING BOARD

Seen at a notice board:

FOR ANYONE WHO HAS CHILDREN AND DOESN'T KNOW IT,

THERE IS A DAY CARE CENTRE ON THE FIRST FLOOR

On a repair shop door:

WE CAN REPAIR ANYTHING.

(PLEASE KNOCK HARD ON THE DOOR - THE BELL DOESN'T WORK)

Outside a shop selling secondhand items:

WE EXCHANGE ANYTHING - BICYCLES, WASHING MACHINES, ETC.

WHY NOT BRING YOUR WIFE ALONG AND GET A WONDERFUL BARGAIN?