Banks and other financial institutions  submit the data of their borrowers(which is us) to the credit rating agencies which closely monitor for defaults, disputed payments etc.  If we lapse in our repayment of our EMIs of Housing loan or a personal loan the rating is going to take a hit. This will affect the chances of getting another credit card or even a top-up loan. We might argue with the Credit card issuer with a dispute over the billing in our card statement. We might even win an argument  and decide to bargain and pay a fraction of the amount and think we have gotten away. But what we do not realise at that moment is , the credit card issuer has already reported  our status as defaulter. That is a blemish on our record.

If you are too young and have just have begun your career, you definitely cannot afford for such mistakes because you have a long list of loans you might take in the next 20-25year period for buying a home, car etc and it is never a one-off relationship with any bank. Mind you they are so well integrated to share the data and you will have nowhere to go.

That reminds me again of  Sheldon Kopp’s escatological laundry list item no

41. You are free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.

Thank god we don’t have a similar system of rating the individual’s career or Job worthiness yet.  Just imagine a central database with ample inputs from employers rating the job worthiness of the individual. Do not worry, it may never happen for the simple reason because of the volume of subjectivity involved in rating the individual….some may vehemently protest this subjectivity but when was the last performance review done objectively…??

I welcome your thoughts on this post.

I, as ever, really appreciate your time and attention. If you would like to get these posts via email, just enter the details in the sidebar on your right and you will never miss a post. If you like to share this post with friends you may use the links below.

I picked up this comic pic from Manu Cornet’s blog.  Here is the link if you want to visit this blog post .

You can take time to introspect looking at the above picture.  It will definitely set you thinking. What does this mean to your career.  Ultimately we all run our worklives to fit into some spot in this lifelong game called career. Every organisation has its own culture and funny ways of motivating /driving people to occupy different spots in their org charts.

When you think deep enough, you will realize its no fun to take the org charts very seriously as we do now.

I welcome your thoughts on this topic.

Here are the 7 truths you may want to know about posting your CVs in Jobsites…

Truth #1

Employers do not have time to search CVs in the job sites. Employers have moved beyond job portals for sieving CVs. The trend now is to focus on building up unique databases of CVs which is not found elsewhere. Young and  innovative, new-age HR Recruiters in large organisations use social media tools to connect and develop these unique databases.  They leave the painful job of searching resumes in jobsites to the consulting folks.

Truth #2

Consultants do search the sites extensively and the livelihood of a professional placement firm  predominantly depends on having access to a job site like Naukri.com or Timesjobs.com. The recruitment consultant in the firm searches the jobsite based on the brief he/she gets from the client(the employer). The client brief is a search brief which gives an idea on the keywords that can be used during the search process. For example, when I worked on an assignment for an MNC specialising in Diabetic care products, the search brief  was built with keywords like Insulins, Analogs, Bovine, SMBG, Pens etc.

Truth #3

If your CV is not getting response, it could be that you have lot of irrelevant key words in your CV. There may be a lot of keywords  which the industry uses but you have ignored in your CV.

Truth #4

You may post your resume free, but the jobsite charges money from their clients to provide access to the resume database. Its after all their business model. But they do a wonderful job of meeting client expectations in resume search. The job portals have worked well in R&D to develop some superb tools which places the keyword rich, well written CVs with clear resume heading  on top of search results.

Truth #5

For a consultant who is perseverant the resume search is a highly cerebral job. So, while posting your CV in a jobsite, spend some time to attract the consultant’s attention to  your CV. Never mess with your data or any fact you put on the CV. Always give the job chronology right.  One of the first reason a consultant ignores a CV is when the  sequence of the various places a candidate worked  is not clear, or worse if it has unexplained gaps. It will never go past the viewing stage. They do not have time to call you and check. They have 100 other well written CVs to call and move ahead.

Truth #6

If resume writing is not your cup of tea, probably its time to seek professional help in writing a key word rich resume before posting them on portals.  Alternately sending the CVs to consultants do not help either because consultants do not find use with your CV till they get a relevant search assignment. Most unsolicited CVs sent to a HR Consultant will often die down in the mail box or remain in some archived folder. For consultant/recruiter, its easier to search for a CV in a job portal rather than their own archived folders.

Truth #7

In a hot job market, the shelf life of a CV is less than 3months for middle level positions and less than a month for a entry to middle level positions. So, for a Placement firm having tons of archived CVs is not really an asset unlike old times. Biggest asset for them is a smart recruiter who understands the job opening and shortlists the right CVs and closes the positions. If you are seriously hunting for a job, updating your CV on a weekly basis to remain fresh on search results is very important.

I welcome your thoughts on this post.

I, as ever, really appreciate your time and attention. If you would like to get these posts via email, just enter the details in the sidebar on your right and you will never miss a post. If you like to share this post with friends you may use the links below.

Very soon your favorite pharma blog will have a job board with rich features. It has been my dream to make pharmacareers.in as not just an industry blog but the one  where companies wanting to hire Healthcare/Pharmaceutical professionals and professionals looking for the best industry jobs meet.

I had earlier experimented without much success,  a job portal model based on asp.net.(IMO a complex platform where my dependency on software guys were 100%)  Eversince moving the domain to a self hosted wordpress blog (and thus gaining the elusive freedom from developers), the site has been slowly gaining popularity and reasonable readership.  This time around with so much work going on in wordpress development, adding a job board to my wordpress blog has actually become quite easy.  The job board should be usable in a few days from now. As a curtain raiser, I just wanted to use this post to give a brief on what to expect from this Job Board. First and foremost, the job posting is free for the advertisers/hirers. If the desire is to have a featured post with a better visibility that comes at a small premium.  But generally job posting will remain as a  free service for now and the times to come.

It has got some really exciting features:

• Radius search for job locations
• Search based on job category, salary, job type etc
• Add logo to the job posting
• Paypal payment gateway
• 30 day expiry period for the job post
• Share the job posts through twitter and facebook

I am working on giving some final touches to this job board. In the meanwhile I would greatly appreciate any feedback as I move forward towards creating something very useful for a lot of you.

I am giving below the details of the event. May be a lot of people who are not regular readers of this blog may benefit too from this event. I would request you all to pass on this post using the social media and sharing links below at the end of the post. As ever I welcome your comments and feedback.



Golden Opportunity for Life Science/Pharma/Medicine/Nursing Graduates, Professionals & Final Year Students.

India’s Biggest Global Job & Internship Fair 2011 at Bangalore

Venue: Presidency College, Hebbal, Bangalore

Date: Friday, 8^th April’11.

Time: 9:30AM – 4PM

Please visit our site www.icrmindia.com for more details.

****Entry is free for participating Companies and job seekers.