How a woman changed her resume to enter the Australian market

• Baishaki Konor spent more than a year looking for work in Australia.
• Connor looks back at his resume and what he would like to change in the future.
• She said it’s important to tailor your resume according to local standards.

Baishaki Konor was working She worked for seven years, first in technology and then in investment banking, when she was laid off at the peak of the financial crisis.

Around the same time, she married an Australian and decided to move to Australia. Connor has worked in India, the UK and Hong Kong and was determined to find work for her in her new home country.

“At that stage, it was very difficult for me to break into the Australian job market, even though I had a fairly significant career globally,” she told Business Insider.

It took over a year and interviews with professional resume consultants before she found a job in Melbourne.

“Looking back and now leading and building my own team, I understand why I didn’t put myself forward in the best way for this job market,” she says of the job application process. Told.

Her resume followed a format popular among students at the Indian Institute of Management. It was one page long and written in font size 8. We started with the “Education” section before moving on to experiences and internships.

This is the resume she used when applying for a job in 2009. Later, she changed her last name.

Reopening the mistakes Connor made

Roughly 15 years later, Connor said he would revisit his resume and do some things differently.

“I was literally petrified,” she said. “If she had received that person’s resume today, she would not have called that person for an interview.”

Here’s what she would change:

1. Add a summary. “It lacked a summary or profile,” Connor said of his resume. Recruiters today are often recruiting for multiple positions at the same time, and having a 2-3 line synopsis that sells who you are can help position candidates. , she said.

1. Let’s try it out: “I worked in investment banking and technology consulting for a while,” Connor said. Even though she has seven years of experience, her resume started with her academic background, with sections about her research papers and leadership positions at universities. “In hindsight, it seems like a very new college resume.”

2. Translate your achievements: “IIMs are very difficult to get into and very selective. But when I came here, people didn’t know what it was,” said Connor, who pursued a master’s degree in India. talked about the university. If you are applying for a job abroad, help the foreign employer understand the scale and prestige of your career. For example: “To give an idea of ​​the size and complexity of your organization, please translate that you are a company with $10 billion in sales or 50,000 employees.”

3. Catering to local employers: “Each country has its own terminology,” Connor says. In retrospect, Connor said, she was writing “career highlights,” not “her work history.” This is because in Australia, “work experience” is something that school students do for free to understand the industry. She added that Australian employees prefer multi-page resumes.

After revising her resume, which included an overview and highlights of her professional experience, Connor said she started getting more interviews and got her first offer three months later.

Connor went on to work with large companies in the consulting and consumer goods sectors before assuming his current role as a retail chain executive. Connor also runs a career-building consulting company that reviews resumes.

Her top tip for resumes is to focus on the next story you’re trying to write for yourself.

“I think a lot of people use a resume to just summarize what they’ve done in the past, but the bigger role of a resume is to sell yourself for the future,” Connor says. To tell.