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.

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.

For most of the time, life of a software engineer is typical. One or two years in a company, then a chance to go onsite and earn some money. Then back home. Another 2 years and one becomes a team lead. After 5-6 years, a manager.

When you go onsite, you can earn up to 1 Lakh Rupees a month if you are a software engineer and more if you are an analyst or a manager. Few companies like IBM, Accenture, Sapient have few or no onsite opportunities. If you are an analyst after 4 years you can expect an offshore pay of Rupees 45 K a month. But offshore pay is hardly anything. It’s what you earn onsite that counts.

Work that suits you

Your engineering branch or degree of study is the last thing that would matter here. Even if you have done PhD in Robotics they won’t bother to put you in the project that suits you. In big companies you do not get to select where you want to work.

Technical skills vs Communication skills?

If you have good speaking skills and can project yourself well to your managers, you will grow. When you code only a couple of lines in a year, you would need to talk the rest of the time. Relation with your boss is very important.

The work is basically simple which almost anybody can do. The work does not involve too much skill of programming. Most of the projects will be related to some business such as Retail or Financial service or Insurance etc. And your managers have no idea about what work you have done. No one is going to be look into your code you wrote or the bug that you fixed. So your salary hike depends upon how well you project yourself and how well you contribute to the project.

Hifi Programmer

Don’t be in thoughts that you are going to become a hi fundu programmer. The only time during which you do some serious programming is during the training period. If you thought Windows Vista code was written in India, you are wrong. The Help documentation was done in India. Remember Indian software industry is not about creating new things. It’s all about client giving you work. Work that their IT team is NOT interested in doing. But you get money, work experience and a life called “White collar job”.

If you are in Mainframe stuff, you’re going to dig into some code written in 1970 and wonder half the time “How could someone write such hopeless code?” You need to add one or two lines into that code. Not more than 20 lines.

The Bench

There are many fresh trainees kept on the bench or given some boring projects. All software companies have to show Resources to their clients. That’s why they hire so many people. And not everyone who joins as a fresher ends up with good work. While you are “On the bench”, you aren’t working for any client and you are an unbilled resource who doesn’t earn any money for the company. Being on the bench for 1-2 months would be “pleasurable.” But any period beyond that will get you frustrated.

The Appraisal

You will get trained in some X technology but will get a project in Y technology (if you are lucky enough to get one!) for which you will be trained again for a month. You slog for hours for an year in the office and at the end your boss will say that your performance was not outstanding and you get an average performance rating in appraisal.

Enjoy your stay!

Reference: pagalguy.com

Which input do you think is the key deciding factor for the Naukri search engine to send you the most relevant jobs to your email inbox?

For those who don’t know Naukri, it’s India’s most reliable job search website. Something like what is Monster.com to the world.

If you hold an account with Naukri.com and remember the credentials, login right away, I have got something interesting to show you.

Steps to follow:

1. Login to Naukri.com
2. Go to Preview and Update profile screen
3. Edit the section Current Professional Details
4. Edit Key Skills
   

Current Professional Details

Focus your attention on the input Key Skills. Read, re-read what keywords you have mentioned here. This tiny section is going to determine your future. Yes, this will have a significant impact on your future. Read on to know how.

The software sitting on Naukri servers simply reads this section, notes down the keywords and sends you jobs relevant to the keywords that you entered here. Naukri software also uses this information to decide whether to forward your profile to the recruiters who post new job positions relevant to your skills.

Use this Key Skills section with caution. Though it is not specified in the update screen, use the first 100 characters to fit in all the skills related to your current job separated by a comma.

For example, this was what I wrote in the Key Skills input of my Naukri profile.

Key Skills

Flex, Java, J2EE, C language,assembly language & C in AVR micro-controller, 8051 micro-controller, PIC micro-controller, Keil U vision micro-controller

I made several mistakes in my “Key Skills” section:

• Don’t exceed character limit: I exceeded the tacit 100 character limit, the total number of characters in my key skills is 153. Which means the skills beyond 100 character mark are being ignored by Naukri.
• Mention skills in order of importance: I did not mention my skills in the order of importance to me (left to right). I guess it is safer to mention your core skills first, because it’s natural that the software would have been written to scan from left to right. Also can avoid the risk of crossing the character limit.
• Use Comma as the separator between key words: I used ‘&’ as a separator. So “assembly language & C in AVR micro-controller” is processed as a single keyword that will match with nothing alike. Don’t use any special character other than comma to separate two keywords.
• Use more frequently used Acronyms as keywords: Instead of “C language”, I could have mentioned “C” as a keyword, as it is more likely to be a keyword.
• Test the keywords in Naukri Search: Instead of “micro-controller”, I could have mentioned “microcontroller” as it matches more closely with the jobs posted at Naukri. When you are in doubt, test the keyword using Naukri job search engine whether any jobs match that keyword.
• Split lengthy keywords: Comma should be the only separator between any two key words. Instead of “8051 micro-controller”, I could have written “8051,microcontroller”. Splitting into two keywords, helps the software to understand your skills better.

After reading my own advice and following it, my Key Skills should look like below.

Key Skills:

Flex,Java,J2EE,JavaEE,C,assembly,AVR,8051,PIC,Keil

Update:
To add to this article, resumes get searched based on the title of the resume. Like whenever you upload your resume into Naukri profile, you have to give a name to your resume. When the employer search for Naukri resumes, the results are pulled out in the list of resumes based upon the title of your Resume Summary section.

An ebook named “Favourite 50 – C Question Bank” had been created and posted to the downloads page of Interview Mantra. That ebook was a result of aggregation of all the C Interview questions and answers posted in Interview Mantra. That was the first edition of this ebook. The ebook was downloaded 8756 times till the date this post had been written.

Inspired by the success of first edition, we have come up with the second edition that includes few corrections, additions and major formatting changes. This book is available for free download exclusively for the readers of Interview Mantra.

Click here to download the second edition of the ebook “Favourite 50 – C Question Bank“

Follow three steps and your resume will be ready in minutes!

Steps:

1. Read the tutorial Ultimate resume guide for freshers written by me.

2. Download this excel sheet- Resume Builder and fill your details.

3. Download Sample resume-1 or Sample resume-2 and copy what you wrote in the excel sheet in step2.

This is the result of finishing the above three steps:

If you are unable to view a resume document above, click here.