Fast-Acting Resume

Abhinav Khanna, a computer security specialist in New Jersey, had an ace in the hole when he attended a job fair in India.

Abhinav Khanna faced a daunting task at the SiliconIndia Job Fair on June 26.

With hundreds of desperate job seekers all vying for the same few positions among the world’s leading software companies he knew his resume had to “pop.”

“I had 30 seconds to give my resume to someone who was … just scanning resumes one after another,” he said.

But four months into his job search, Khanna, a computer security specialist living in New Jersey, had an ace in the hole. He recently had his resume rewritten by a certified professional resume writer who works with Ladders. The new resume made a better pitch for Khana’s expertise as a “network security” and “distributed networks” specialist. Another impressive feature on the revised resume was a description of his professional successes, which demonstrated what the return on investment was for his past employers, including his role in helping his organization acquire a multimillion dollar contract. It made a clear case for the return on investment his next employer would be likely to experience.

The resume was so effective that a recruiter for one of the world’s leading software companies made a move right there on the spot.

“She made calls to her manager and said, ‘Hey, we might have something,’ ” Khanna said. “I took my interview right there standing in the middle of the job fair.”

They then scheduled more interviews, including telephone interviews from India and Germany, and the company later flew Khanna to California for a whirlwind series of interviews with the company’s top brass lasting from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. “I must have drunk seven cups of coffee,” he said.

The over-caffeinated strategy worked out very well for Khanna, and on July 21 he was offered a job as senior manager at one of the company’s offices in his homeland, India. He was hired just a few weeks after the initial meeting at SiliconIndia.

In addition to the popping resume, he said one of the keys to landing the job he wanted was simply assessing his situation and planning a path to success.

“I think it’s important to have clarity of [the] goals in your own head – and finally I got it,” he said. “It took a long time but it was really worth it.”