I'm sitting here shaking my head in frustration again, after reading a bunch of biographies of recent graduates. This frustration started a long time ago when I returned from the USA to Palestine to help found the Palestinian Telecommunications Company in the mid-1990s. At that time, we found excuses ourselves to a large number of applicants at that time, as companies were setting up quickly, given that the entire private sector was shifting from the traditional operating mode to the modern operating mode. It was expected that the new graduates would, with the passage of time, find solutions to their obvious weaknesses, especially in light of the universities' efforts to develop new methods and programs designed to qualify new graduates, not to mention the level of awareness that the graduate himself was supposed to have achieved by following the developments of the labor market and self-learning. If universities developed job search skills through these programs, we did not see the impact of that and the graduates did not rise to the required level, of course not all of them, but enough to write this article!
It's been a long time since I got involved in recruiting fresh graduates, but now I'm involved with a leading mid-sized management services firm as part of a business consulting where I had the chance to get a closer look at the fresh graduates, which was frustrating.
Let me share with you ten examples of resumes that I received in the hope that you are aware of what I saw. First of all, I will not address the weakness of the language, whether Arabic or English, and I will not mention spelling errors, including writing the name of their university incorrectly, poor coordination... and other things. I advise recent graduates to pay close attention to taking notes at the core of their needs, and to consider my article as free advice on a silver platter.
1. The winning candidate who applied is the one who sent 31 attached files via e-mail which is a CV file and 30 pictures - verbatim - of certificates and the like, knowing that any of these certificates were required in the job advertisement.
2. The majority of those who emailed us left the text of the message blank, and sometimes, they didn't even bother to type in a title for the message either. Obviously, the entire generation does not know how to send a simple email.
3. A large number of people sent their CVs in response to the announced job, even though the job requirements were not related to their qualifications or academic specialization in any way, either from near or from afar. What a waste of time for the sender and the reader at the same time!
4. A young woman sent her resume in a PowerPoint file, but why? I did not find a logical answer to this question.5. While some of them thought it better to send a link to their CVs located in the cloud storage space (Google Drive). Why they think doing so will give them a special advantage is not fully understood. I would probably understand this if the CV had multimedia features and contained large files, but when the CV size does not exceed half a page with the aforementioned content, it is completely illogical for them to send it in this format.
6. The majority of those who sent their CVs gave names such as "CV", "My CV", "New CV", "Resume No. 2" and similar names. Perhaps their parents are happy that their children have graduated and obtained degrees in marketing or business administration. Oh poor people.
7. A large number of applicants received training with large companies such as Paltel and Jawwal, and in banks as well. It is noticeable that they exaggerate the experience they gained during the training to a degree that suggests that it exceeded dozens of years, which creates the impression that the fact that one of them has trained for a few weeks in a large company can start his life Operation as a manager.
8. The person who sent his resume in the form of a picture, low quality and no message, made me think that his pet cat was playing with his phone and that he sent it by mistake. According to Adel Imam, what is the logic?!
9. I received a lot of CVs with personal photos of their owners, and the most prominent CV of a young woman whose profile picture occupied the entire front page, as I was horrified at first glance when I opened the file, which made me wonder with amazement whether the goal behind this was to get a job or was there a purpose Another incomprehensible, especially since she sent a picture of her sitting in a car.
10. I respect graduates who send their CVs written in Arabic because it is their mother tongue, but when I see a CV in Arabic sent with a text that lacks formatting to the point that the text is tilted to the left side of the page, without spaces between lines or words, it makes me see that the problem is not in the language used By itself, but by the autobiographer himself.
The above ten examples are only a sampling of what I saw, and I will leave my impressions of the interviews for another article.
The low level of skills and knowledge of graduates is totally unacceptable.
Yes, is not acceptable. I'm not going to be lenient this time around and say it's a good start and you're going to get better, and it's great that you're trying...etc. If you are looking for a job with the above methods, you are not doing well and you have to gain more knowledge. The world of knowledge is just a "click of a button" on the mobile phone that has become an integral part of you, why not use your phones to learn better!
There is no excuse for this randomness in graduate job searches, not to mention the low level of graduate self-presentation.
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Sam Bahour is a business consultant from Al-Bireh. He blogs at ePalestine.ps and tweets as SamBahour on Twitter.
