Resume Objective

The most boring part of most resumes is the “objective”. A complete lack of imagination leads to cookie cutter statements such as “To excel in software development” or “secure position in a dynamic company engaged in cutting edge development“. These objectives can come of as being redundant or a recruiter will skim through it and put it on auto-ignore. Since the objective is usually at the top of the resume, it has to earn that spot. A good way to identify your objective is to reflect your underlying belief system – what you stand for and where you want to be – . An objective has to succinct and clear. There are three simple steps to creating clear objectives

1. Write down your belief statement(who you are and where you want to be)

2. Filter it out and remove redundant language. Filter it further.

3. Give it clear focus.

Some examples of clear objectives can be

News Editor position with a focus on economic affairs. Open to relocation.

Ruby on Rails developer position with a startup in Bangalore

Sales executive position in the automobile industry. Open to travel/relocation.

Prashanth Singh is a feedback rockstar!

We receive feedback in many ways. A lot of it from our feedback link at the footer, some of it via emails and then you have the ‘prashanth singh ‘ feedback level. We love feedback in all shapes,sizes and forms as any company should. But Prashanth poked around our site from a user experience perspective and put together a set of images with embedded comments.

We wanted to give a shout out to prashanth and thank him for his extra effort. So, if you are a user and you come across anything you want to share, please do so. If you are feeling lazy about using the feedback form, feel free to leave us a comment on this blog.

PS2 sweepstakes

We are giving away a playstation 2 and the FIFA soccer game here at CampusChai. The contest is extremely simple and straightforward. Everybody that signs up at CampusChai gets their own unique url. So for ex: if your login was asha , your url would be www.campuschai.com/asha . You can now publish this url to

1. Your blog sidebar.

2. Your orkut homepage.

3. Your ryze homepage

4. Any other creative ways to use your url

We track your url and everytime someone clicks on your url, you will get points. The user with the most points wins. We have had some great response to our contest. So far, here are the top three publishers

• Kamlesh Bharti

• Sathya Narayan Puja Panda (trailing by 26 points)

• Divyesh Gaind (trailing by 49 points)

So what are you waiting for, signup at http://www.campuschai.com and get in on the action!

Resume 101’s

Anand Jain has written an insightful piece here on the do’s and dont’s of resume building. A resume is not something to be slapped together listing all the great things about yourself. Think of yourself as a company and imagine how you would like to represent yourself to the outside world. Every word has to be carefully constructed to make an overall impact with the resume. The most effective way to create your resume is online – think about it, you will be able to capture your thoughts, make corrections or even save it and come back later.(Shameless plug here – CampusChai will let you create your resume within seconds and even breaks it down to the three main areas – contact information, accomplishments and project/work history). Another common mistake is to make a resume resemble a PhD thesis. In a world of information overload, Most employers will not even go past the first page. Whatever you do, do not ever use a resume writing service. A lot of their resumes are standard templates and if a employer figures it out, it may actually work against you.

Can Spam!

We are very happy to announce one of our requested features to mark jobs as spam. Now you can do just that, just hit the ‘Report this job as spam’ link. we will then use our google-isque algorithms and figure out if the job is really spam material. We will also have a human review the job and the job will then be removed from our database.

India Inc new graduates – Quantity over Quality?

There is a thought-provoking article(requires registration) today on the New york times written by Somini Sengupta. It looks at the current skills gap being experienced by technology companies in India and and the quality of engineering grads being produced by Indian colleges. The facts are eye-opening: While India produces more than 400,000 engineers a year, only 1 in 4 is considered hire worth by these companies. Obviously the other three graduates are not making the cut which leads up to the skills shortage.

Somini addresses some key issues in the article

• Hiring is showing no pace of slowing down. Technology companies expect to double their hiring in the next four years. ICICI is planning to add 40,000 workers in the next three years.
• Companies are expanding their Campus recruitment colleges and are now spanning beyond first and second tier schools.
• Technology firms are placing more emphasis on soft skills rather than just looking at a candidate’s technical skills.
• Special institutes are now cropping up to help candidates improve their communication and creative thinking abilities
• India is considering allowing private equity investment in the higher education sector.

I think this article needs to be a wake up call not only to the education ministry but also to colleges churning out these graduates. While hiring professors with a Phd may not be possible overnight, colleges can take simple steps towards improving their candidate’s marketability. Some of them may be starting in-house courses on business english and encouraging group discussions. Indian colleges should also learn from their american counterparts in the sense that they need to encourage students to participate actively in the open source movement.Maybe even adopt a few open source project’s themselves.

At CampusChai, our vision is to reduce this gap. We will be able to provide colleges a platform to showcase their abilities and track important metrics in campus recruitment. A lot the graduates are half finished products because colleges do not have a platform to collect aggregated placement data and use that info. We believe that colleges that use CampusChai will have access to this data and better equip their students to meet industry demands. Somini’s article ends on a sad note for Mr. Rangaswamy, the founder of a college. The reason being that TCS decides not to recruit at his college. With CampusChai at his side, Mr. Rangaswamy might just finish his next NYT appearance on a happy note

if you have a sec, vote on the poll below

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Keep that feedback coming!

We have had lots of feedback since our launch(especially in terms of college coverage etc). We have been SLAMMED with stuff to change and work upon. Its amazing that you could have alpha tested your app over and over but your users will find unique ways to break the site. Thats cool and we are not holding it against them. An interesting one was where a user would apply for a job and the auto-reply would end up in our admin mailbox. We have since made the from a no-reply field with the reply-to pointing back to the user. Thanks for all the feedback and keep them coming!!

The Big Picture

Update

Sorry some of you may have received multiple emails. We are extremely sorry about this.

Thanks to all those users who provided us their email at our splash page. Your launch email is being sent out as I type this and fear not , we dont have any devious plans to spam or sell your email address. A lot of you (especially students) emailed us from the splash page wanting to know more about the service and what it would offer, We hope to make some your questions clear in this post

Objective

CampusChai was started with the goal of providing a simple web based service for all campus recruitment related activities in India. We plan to do this by:

Providing colleges with tools to manage their placement strategy.

Enabling employers to collaborate better with Universities/Colleges and Students.

Helping students experience a streamlined recruiting process when launching their career.

We are planning to launch the site in stages. Currently the site covers Jobs, Events(Walkin’s/Campus hiring) , Student Profiles and job interview tips/suggestions. Eventually the site will provide an end-to-end solution to the Campus Recruitment domain. Of course the soon to be released features will stay focussed on the core aspects of our site.

Features:

Create your career profile in minutes. We wanted to provide an easy, simple way to add your details with the minimum amount of fuss and clicks.

We have also tried to make it easy to find Jobs. Instead of a confusing array of search options and checkboxes and the like. We have one search box. You can enter specific keywords,tags,locations or a combination of keyword and locations. So if you are looking for a BPO job in Noida with fresher qualifications, you would type bpo,fresher,noida .

You can also apply for jobs with a single click with no page refresh. Your profile and files will be added to the employer’s applicant folder and the employer will be notified(depending on their settings)

Campus recruitment events are core to the recruitment process and we didnt want you to miss out on them. Employers can schedule events by city or college. If an event is scheduled in your college or city, you will see it on your events page with the upcoming ones at the top. You can then choose to add/remove yourself from the event on the same page.

We also included a goldmine’ section on tips and suggestions on how to tackle interviews etc. The area also covers interview questions and provides students with abilities to comment on questions.

We hope that this gives you an idea of what CampusChai offers from a student perspective. We will cover the employer aspects of the site in our next post. If you are in a hurry, you can learn more <a href=”www.campuschai.com/learn”>here</a>. Do let us know what you think.

CampusChai is live!!

Hey everybody, we are live and kicking. Our baby CampusChai was successfully delivered 2:30pm IST. Server and application are doing fine. Stop by and say hello. Please give us your feedback at admin AT campuschai DOT com

We will have more details tomorrow.