Resume, Laxman, Time & Dreamers

Issue 22

How are these topics curated every week? Some of it is based on what I have read or heard in a podcast or watched on YouTube. Some of the ideas are shared by readers. So if you find something you want to share, please email it to me and if I cannot include it in the current issue, it will find its way to the next one.

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1. What NOT to write in your resume in 2020

Resume is a word that originated from a French word (pronounced ‘rez-you-may’, not ‘re-zume’). Education, skills & employment summarized together is called a Resume. A resume is an outline of what you are and does not list down all details of a profile, but showcases specific skills customised to the target job.

Like everything else, resume trends change. Here are two things recruiters frown upon these days:

1. Don’t mention hobbies. Wait for someone to bring it up during the interview. Avoid listing three generic ones I have come across in a million resumes under the hobbies section - “reading, music and sports”.

2. Avoid writing “references will be provided on request”. Of course, you will need to do it before the final decision is made.

   Here is what you should include according to ResumeLab and here is a visual summary. Do you find the visuals useful?

   

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2. How do Indians spend time?

Indians are social creatures. They spend two hours and ten minutes socialising, of which, they spend at least one-and-a-half hours talking or chatting. Instead of The Argumentative Indian, maybe the title should be the The Garrulous Indian. We talk while commuting, between traffic light changes and at work. It is the sign of a collectivist society.

A survey by the National Statistical Office (NSO) found that work-related travel also increases with income levels. I know several senior leaders who used their commuting time to share feedback with team members, catch up on office gossip or even interview candidates.

Who spends more time on commute - men or women? Do people in rural areas travel more than urban areas? But the one section that I was truly shocked by was the bit about reading habits. How much time do Indians spend on reading (that includes time spent reading the newspaper). Find out if you are wrong

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3. RK Laxman

I learned to draw cartoons and caricatures by first copying RK Laxman’s cartoons. It was his 99th birthday on 24th October 2020.

Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Laxman (24 October 1921 – 26 January 2015) was an Indian cartoonist, illustrator, and humorist. He is best known for his creation ‘The Common Man’ and for his daily cartoon strip, ‘You Said It’ in The Times of India, which started in 1951.

In 1954, Asian Paints, a little known company then tasked RK Laxman to create an identity for itself. The story goes on that RK Laxman was chain smoking for inspiration and through the smoke he saw the image of ‘Gattu’ (the Asian Paints Mascot he designed) take shape. Akshay Anthony shared more on his twitter timeline. Read it

Here is what I wrote when Laxman passed away on 26 Jan 2015. Read it

Who is your favourite cartoonist?

4. Nine questions on LinkedIn Live

On the Unabashed Podcast (listen here to get a drift) Neha and I discuss all things talent. The 10th episode will be streamed live here on Monday 26 Oct 2020 at 5:30pm IST Join< SHRM India LinkedIn page >

9 powerful questions we want to discuss with you (and yes, we will also share our views too), but we want to know what you think. Want to share a view about these, leave a comment:

1. What are some job roles that should be there today but aren’t?

2. If where you work from doesn’t matter, would ‘workcation’ be the new perk?

3. Are Millennials and Gen-Z suitable labels for Indian youth?

4. Does online college education create bigger skill gaps?

5. Does hiring freeze have a silver lining?

6. Can Tik-Tok style content creation accelerate skill development?

7. Does benchmarking limit organization’s creativity?

8. Why do we have fewer women CHROs despite there being more women in HR?

9. Do People Managers shape employee experience?

See you on 26 Oct 2020 at 5:30pm on the SHRM India LinkedIn page

5. Dreamers die young … often enough

There are Dreamers and Unicorns everywhere. Who is a #Dreamer? Someone who is riddled with uncertainty about the outcome. The method to achieve success is not known. Maybe I should say that survival is uncertain. It is like walking on a tightrope where falling down would mean certain death. Some die because they run out of funds. Some die because the founders do not have deep expertise.

On 21st Oct 2020, Quibi, a short form streaming service, shut down. It had two iconic founders - Jeffry Katzenberg and Meg Whitman and had raised $1.75 billion. Katzenberg was a chairman of Disney Studios and the cofounder and CEO of Dreamworks, while CEO Meg Whitman was the former chief executive of HP.

Why did consumers refuse to pay between $5-8 per month to watch short form videos? Katzenberg blames the death of Quibi on the pandemic. What do you think is the reason Quibi died?

I would say that Quibi (which was a Dreamer) landed up competing with the streaming service of Market Shapers like Disney, NBC, HBO etc. Each one has a bigger library of content and an established base of paying customers. Let us not forget that during the same time when Quibi struggled to find consumers, Netflix added 26 million paid new subscribers in the first two quarters of 2020. Let me not forget another #MarketShaper - TikTok that knows that consumers don’t have the patience to watch anything for 10 minutes.

“But now that we have the data, it shows that the average ad viewing time can be as low as 1.7 seconds. We stopped wasting money on 30-second ads, and we’re now designing ads to work in two seconds.”

Read this to know how 2 second ads are the standard now

That is all for this week. See you on my LinkedIn Live at 5:30pm on 26 Oct 2020 on the SHRM India page. Will wait for you. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please click the share button below to spread the word.

@AbhijitBhaduri