Things are completely or diamterically opposite for me here in Melbourne especially in the job front. In India I used to get tonnes of calls from the recruiters and I used to have a tough time in refusing them, whereas here I am running after the recruiters and they are not even giving an audience. Similarly I was often complimented for my resume back in India and the general comment I used to receive was "Your CV gives the story / image of you". Here I am not getting any interview calls, which makes me wonder whether the problem is with my CV or I am being subjected to some kinda racism.
I did pay a hefty price to understand the work practise of the recruiters here in Melbourne. If I dare to say, it is a job consultant mafia here. They can decide to make or break you. Even though it is the same story back in India, the recruiters there are more technically knowledgable than the job consultants here. So I used to send my "regular" resume to all the consultants (in India) and rarely the modifications were needed until unless the role demanded some explicit details. Here I lost few opportunities of even to be "considered" when I used that "vanilla" profile.
Once there was an advertisement that mentioned about "Data Migration" as one of the job responsibilities. In my CV, I had mentioned "Master Data upload using LSMW" as one of my responsibilities in one of my projects. For anybody who knew SAP, they are aware that LSMW is one of the tools for migrating the data from non SAP system to SAP system. So I didn't bother to explicitly say "Data Migration" in my CV. I applied for one of the jobs and waited for a while to hear from the consultant. After a week I called the consultant back and asked for the response. She said that she had filtered out my CV at her level itself. I was upset and told her that my previous experiences had fit to 'T' with her requirements and why I was not shortlisted.
Losing in an interview is another thing but my CV not even reaching the prospect employer is a painful experience. She cool-ly said that I didn't have the Data Migration experience. I asked her what she meant by 'Data Migration'. She said to mass create the data in SAP which is already found in their existing system. I said that I had mentioned that in my CV as "Master data upload through LSMW". She again insisted that I didn't have the "Data Migration" experience. It was a hard learnt lesson that you shouldn't believe that recruiters know things more on the skills which they are recruiting.
Another experience was also similar but thankfully not that much damaging. There was this consultant who asked whether I had worked on the Retail - Logistics part of SAP. Since she was an Indian and gave me a hearing. I had very tough time in teaching her that "Logistics" she is looking for with the Job Description in her hand is just "Logistics Execution" and I had worked on that area. There is nothing like SAP Retail-Logistics and thankfully she said that she understood the difference. Not to take chances again I modified my CV and sent her again. There are some more harrowing experiences in dealing with the job consultants here and like Santhanam says "Practice makes man perfect", I had got an idea of what to do when I see a job advertisement.
After these experiences I am modifying my CV everytime for every job advertisement. I copy paste the job responsibilities first and start building / paraphrasing my experience over the words found in the Job Description. Before sending the email, chase the consultant and speak something (even if nonsense) just create that "personification". So applying for the job itself had become a laborious process but what to do? Never mind that I have 100s of copies of same CV stored under different file names and little different paraphrased responsibilities. It is for the basic survival.
