How to find a Job Description to focus your resume?

I have seen many students and even professionals struggling to make a good resume.  A resume is a sales document designed to impress complete strangers within seconds. It needs to grab initial attention – and make a positive first impression.

This first step is as crucial in the recruitment process as any other steps. Unfortunately, it is the most ignored one as well.

In this tutorial series, we will go through the tricks of building a good resume using easy to follow steps.

So let us get right on to the point. To build a good resume you need to go through the following steps:

• Decide your aspired job profile
• Analyze the Job Description
• Build your resume – Essential Sections
• Build your resume – Final Steps

This part of the series assumes that you have already finalized your aspired job profile. We will learn to find the Job Description for your dream job and decode it.

What is a Job Description

A job description or JD is a document that describes the expected responsibilities, expectations, and qualifications of the role holder. It is a critical document that helps the candidate get a feel of the role and its requirements.  Most likely it would be available with the job posting itself.

What if I don’t have a Job Description

If a JD is not available directly from the recruiter’s end, try searching on the internet for the designation.

For example, try searching for “Manufacturing Engineer Job Description”. You will get many pdf documents and direct job postings on job portals. All you have to do is to check a couple of them and prepare an average job posting document.

(Source: Google.com)

What if I don’t even know the Job Role

In most cases of campus interviews, companies coming to campuses are simply looking for the best fresh talent. Therefore, they do not have a very clear-cut, well-defined job description in mind.

Perhaps that is why one of the most common questions I get from freshers is – how to prepare for a campus interview without any specific job description. Well, this is a logical question.

In fact, generally, such campus hiring processes happen in anticipation of job roles. This leaves a significant time gap between the selection and joining. This further makes it difficult to hire for specific vacancies or job roles.

Therefore, most campus interviews happen without a specific Job Description in place. This is more or less true for most of the companies.

That said, all such companies do have a past trend or practice of placing the fresh graduates in certain roles. These could be their front line sales roles, production in-charge roles, software testing roles, customer relationship management roles, and so on.

If the company has sent any communication to the college placement team, the communication would have information about the kind of roles. Get in touch with the placement officer to explore the roles. Attend the pre-placement talk if the company is organizing one.

If no such information is available, do a bit of research about the company on the internet.  Find out where it places fresh graduates from your particular stream and specialization. Then use a generic JD suiting that job.

For example, a fresh mechanical/electrical engineer in a production firm would most likely overview the shop floor or assembly lines. This is a work of operations/production executive.  So, try to align your resume to a generic job description of operations/production engineer.

Now, once you know your expected role, finding out a general Job Description is pretty easy.

You may refer the table ahead to check the general positions companies recruit freshers for.

You can now search the internet to get any comparable job description of such a role in any company. Most likely the role requirements will be similar for your target job.

I hope you will be able to get a JD now for your target job roles. Next, we will see how to extract useful information from the JD.

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