The recruiter’s aim in taking an interview is to filter candidates and choose the best fit candidates that are beneficial to the company.

To choose from, there are thousands of freshers holding the same degree, falling in a common range of academic score of 60-75% from all over the country.

How would a recruiter differentiate between one candidate and another? After all, the job applicants to an entry level position are fresh college pass-outs with no industrial experience.

How would a recruiter discern good candidate from a large crowd of students?

I had asked this question to couple of experienced recruiters. All of them consensually told that they looked for the following three qualities in students.

1. Fluent at Communication
2. ​​​Reasonably good at Aptitude
3. Ability to apply logic in real life

Fluent communication in a team is an important pre-requisite for any employee. In many occasions employees would have to directly talk to the clients of the company. So, fluency in English communication is a key skill.

The Aptitude of the candidate is analyzed by recruiters by asking questions from competitive tests such as CAT, GRE, etc. Aptitude could be broadly divided into two sub-categories – Qualitative aptitude and Quantitative aptitude; the R.S Agarwal kind of questions.

Good at theory doesn’t mean good at practical. Recruiters know that very well. In their experience, they might have seen many freshers who were selected based on their theoretical knowledge, who later fail badly in putting theory to practice. Interviewers are going to present you real life scenarios and would ask you to suggest a solution.

For example, a recruiter could ask an electronics engineer to design an electronic device that could dynamically change the duration of traffic lights based on the traffic.

The interviewer could ask a computer science graduate to design a simple database for maintaining personal, salary and project information of employees in a company.

So, if you are a fresher trying for jobs, keep these three points in mind and be sure to prove the interviewer that you possess these qualities. If you succeed, the job is yours!

Eligibility Criteria:

• BCA or B.Sc graduates (Computer Science/ Electronics/ Mathematics/ Physics/ Statistics / Information Technology / Information Science only)
• Candidates who have graduated in 2008, 2009 & 2010 with experience of up to 24 months are eligible to apply
• Simple average aggregate of 60% throughout Class X, XII & Graduation.
• Should not have participated in the Infosys selection process in the last 9 months.
• Should be willing to relocate and work in a 24×7 environment.

If you qualify the above criteria, email your resume to

graduates@infosys.com

on/before 23^rd July, 2010.

Short listed candidates will be informed via e-mail about the selection process.

If you wish to send your resume through employee reference, email your resume to us at

sridhar@interviewmantra.net

To get interview calls to positions whose nature of work differs from that of your current profession or field of work, simply mention the keywords related to the job you aspire for.

For example, if an IT engineer wishes to apply for finance related jobs in addition to IT jobs, he would mention the following in his Key Skills.

Key Skills:

Java,C,finance,accounts,financial analyst,financial manager

Let us say an Embedded System Engineer is looking for IT jobs. His Key Skills should be something like this.

Key Skills:

Embedded systems,microcontroller,java,C,SQL

Say a developer wishes to switch role to a tester. Here is an imagination of which Key Skills that person should write.

Key Skills:

SQL,UNIX,testing,manual,automated,QTP,regression,

In a lighter note, if Sachin Tendulkar secretly wanted to become a Singer like Lata Mangeshkar, he would mention his key skills as following.

Key Skills:

Cricket,one day,test,20 20,singer,playback,artist,bollywood.

The reason why he mentioned cricket skills first is that he doesn’t want to drastically make a career shift to the line of Singing. This suggests Naukri search that Sachin is still open for opportunities in cricket along with playback singing. Sachin wants to play safe, like he does in ground.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave. ~Dale Carnegie

Presentations are ubiquitous. There is no escape; In college projects, MBA assignments, business proposals, office meetings, product reviews and  trainings.

Your proficiency is judged based on your presentation skills. That is not a fair way to evaluate a person’s knowledge, but unfortunately that’s how the world works. If you give a good presentation, people think that you are smart, they’ll buy your product, give you recommendations, bring you business and most importantly they listen to you.

Some people struggle to deliver a good presentation even after having presented a number of times in the past. And those who grab attention at presentations are tagged as “born with silver spoon in the mouth”.

Trust me, giving a great presentation that draws applause from a tired audience is not really tough. All you have to do is stick to few basics and break rules at the same time.

The pre-requisite for a presenter to be able to deliver a good presentation is to first get convinced of his argument himself. If you are not thoroughly convinced about what you are talking, you will never be able to convince others.

After all, good presentation aims only to enable the audience to understand giving them a pleasant experience and an aha feeling at the end of the slides.

It’s very surprising to notice that many experienced professionals and professors can’t give a catchy presentation even after having presented many times.

No problem. That’s a good thing for you because, now(after going through the presentation above,) you know the technique to give a good presentation. You have now become one among the elite group of wonderful presenters (supposedly born with silver spoon in the mouth)!!!

Add your presentation tips and experiences in comments.

Imagine a project of building a skyscraper having 100 floors (highly unlikely as we don’t have so much patience to build 100 floors), we want to save all that money that goes for the compensation of dumb design engineers, architects and interior designers. So that we can use that money to hire more laborers who know to build walls. The laborers themselves will figure out with their experience how to build the building. After all those cheap laborers might have built so many buildings till now.

We like improvisation, we don’t plan our cities, we don’t plan disaster management, we don’t plan for critical risks. We (referring to Indian project managers) like using the word “proactive” a lot of times in a desperate attempt to motivate the employees and sometimes as an excuse to giving a bad appraisal to a hard working employee, also to suppress the voice of employees. But we are not proactive, we hate pro-activity.

Instead, we follow the nature’s law of reaction, Newton’s third law. We react to things as and when they come. “Chalega… Dekhlenge….” (translates roughly to “it runs…we shall see later”) is the perfect representation of our typical attitude. Where CAT exam fails online, where Bhopal tragedy happens unforeseen, where Maoists kill hundreds of policemen without any intelligence information, negligence , laziness and arrogance is not something new.

If someone insists us to plan a task or himself spends time in design, we call him a dreamer and a loser. Winner according to us is the one who works day in and day out, slogs at offices for 14 hours a day, sweats at work without having any idea of what he/she is doing, without any care for the quality of the product being built, completely ignoring the risks and repercussions.

May it be software, or politics, or municipal corporation, or public security, or public convenience or even a patient struggling for life! There is no interest shown by the authorities in planning.

Hey wait, having said all that, there is dreaming for sure. A lot of dreaming. Politicians loftily speak about making India one of the developed nations in the next 10 years (speak about realistic goal setting!), Realtors boast of their hastily built commercial projects as “state of art” building, not to forget the wonderful Sanskrit names they choose, IIT-ans claim that their startup will soon downsize Google, engineers claim that their plagiarized projects to become the next big thing in the world, sports coaches claim that India will get the most number of Gold medals in coming Olympics.

We want to go to Swarga(heaven in Sanskrit), but we don’t want to die!!!!

We want results, but we wont focus on high level management and execution!

Comments?

Email your resume immediately to:

freshers@infosys.com

Voila! Your resume will be stored in the database of Infosys Technologies. If you are lucky, in a couple of months, you will receive a computer generated email from Infosys shortlisting you for an off campus placement test.

You can surely count on this technique as I have known friends who are working for Infy who had got placed by emailing their resume to the above mentioned email id.

Ensure that your resume includes your date of birth, aggregate academic credentials of standards 10, 12 Engineering / Graduation, Post Graduate and E-mail ID for communication.

Send in your resume, mentioning the following in the subject line:

Job Code – Preferred Location of Selection Test
Example: “SWT-01 – BANGALORE”

Good Luck to you!

I assume that you are currently in the 6th semester of degree. The only way you can get a job at this point of time is through campus placement. You can reserve a job for future if you are lucky and your college organizes on-campus placement drive, and if you are eligible for the placement drive, make it in through the interview.

Otherwise, you will have to wait until you reach last semester of your final year. You can then upload your resume to job portals such as www.naukri.com , www.monsterindia.com etc., and tell the job market world that you are available for a job placement.

For now, I suggest you to improve your puzzle solving skills by doing books such as Puzzles to Puzzle you by George summers or Shakunthala Devi puzzles. Also work on your general aptitude skills which include mathematical problems solving, logical problems etc. You will find a lot of placement papers on the internet in websites such as www.freshersworld.com or www.placementpapers.net

Feel free to ask me anything related to placements. Do not feel inhibited to ask or put forth your concerns with respect to your job search.

A day before attending a  job interview, I print a couple of codes that I have written and carry them with me. This helps me more than in one way to clear the interview.

By reviewing code what I wrote an year back, I get a chance to revise what I know. Many a time, we forget concepts that we already know, let alone new ones.

Another advantage is that I can show it as a proof of my proficiency to write codes. This will be a confidence booster to me as I’m not faking, the code is hand written(typed) by me.

Try this trick, it will never let you down.

I can relate to this. You?

Will update more soon. Keep reading Interview Mantra.