By Ashutosh Singh:
Placements are around the corner, which is a good thing, but the employment scenario is still grim. These two statements when used together can create huge anxiety among college students. But on deeper probe, one finds that there is another anxiety gripping them which may seem superficial to grown-ups but is as problematic for them. This problem is called Résumé.
A résumé is a piece of paper which tries to capture all of your life’s major achievements. Despite being a small harmless piece of paper, it can make one’s life heaven or hell, especially during placement season. Like nurturing a small child, it takes a lot of time to prepare a good résumé. It also possesses the potential to convert one’s achievement over the lifetime into a few words that may range from terrific to trivial.
In the good old days, the resume used to be a function of grammatical accuracy as potential employers would base their judgment upon how sentences were formulated and one’s career hinged upon a small comma, or an apostrophe. It was quite common to find men rushing to local experts and almost begging them to write their resume.
And then came computers and everything was changed. It came with products like MS Word that allowed one to put their thoughts freely without caring for spelling errors taking place during the course of action. But this solved only one and very small portion of the problem, one still needed to apply their brain to navigate through the entire process. This was a problem and where there is a problem, there is a startup. More so in this era of internet boom, these start ups are mainly geared at the young population who spend a major portion of their time on the internet, who are concerned with job opportunity and therefore, resumes. Resumes play a very crucial role in deciding their fate.
Some of these start ups charge you a certain fees for building and improving your résumé. Major job portals offer these services but there are very few takers for such services as it involves exchange of money which college students generally don’t feel like shelling out. Under these circumstances, online résumé checkers came up who don’t do anything for you but mainly assist you in building great resumes. One such start up and probably the only one operating in this domain in India as of now has been gaining huge momentum among elite Indian colleges. Its called Vmock. What it does is fairly simple, you have to upload your résumé on the website and then it grades it. It also provides you with feedback to improve your résumé.
There are two reasons why Vmock is finding resonance with youth:
First reason is that it is helping them help themselves by providing constant feedback. As a matter of fact, Vmock’s tagline is ‘Feedback is gold’ and that’s why it is one of the best online resume checking tools around. Students who want to check their résumé and know where they stand should give it a try.
The second and more important reason is that its free and essentially harmless.