Anil Sharma discusses different types of job searches and the skills and attributes important for each. There are three main types: 1) campus recruitment focusing on general knowledge, IQ, academics; 2) network hiring prioritizing connections and performance in critical skills; 3) open market hiring emphasizing resume, references, published work, and job search skills. The skills and experiences valued differ depending on the type of job search and career path. Strong academic performance and well-rounded attributes help with campus recruitment, while specific skills and networks are key for other types of searches and jobs.

1. CBIR Consulting
Anil Sharma
sharma_anil@yahoo.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anil-sharma-592754/

2. Education, Careers and Job search experiences
Most of the academic programs focus on general purpose skill-set development. There are a few
things you learn through your studies and then there are some other attributes in your persona which you
“get” through your “total academics” experience. You career interests, your job focus and job-track would
help you develop some additional highly important skills for your job type, some of them very critical. It’s
been more than 20 years that I have been in research, development and strategic analysis jobs in
multiple types of career-tracks so far ranging from software development and architecture to consulting
and strategic analysis and finally to operations management and planning. From my understanding and
leanings through education and job reviews till now, I can tell that critical skill sets on a measurement
scale for your job success in above mentioned type of careers and job tracks would rank in this order:
1. Mathematical Ability: Base level, Good arithmetic intelligence
2. Comparative Analysis: Apples to apples, Oranges to oranges, Common sense
3. Graphical Analysis: Knowledge of "how much different". What kind of differences, Visual “eye”
4. Statistical Analysis: Mean, Median, Mode, Deviation, Variance calculation type of intelligence in
analytics
5. Visual Analysis/Data Science: Visioning, Visualization, Extrapolation, Interpolation, Understanding of
patterns and ability to follow and match trends
6. Historical analysis or data processing: Knowledge and analytics timeline processing of “History, Civics,
Geography along with Science”, General knowledge and quick information storage and retrieval
7. Algorithmic Analysis: Real time “Cluster analysis, A/B testing, Processing information in head,
Regression of multiple decision at once in real time” when needed
8. Imagination: Understanding of the word "New”, “From definition of it to putting it to shape and
concluding it to fruition”
Now on career and job search front though, I have been through job searches and employee
recruitment rounds multiple times so far in my career and have leaned few things in my past 20 years of
recruitments, jobs and job search experiences. Here are some of the “types” of job search experiences I
have been through:
1. Campus recruitment job searches (BS & MS/MBA): When companies go out and hire students
from campuses, they mostly look for the best students. That is why they put out challenging
recruitment and qualification process that measures student qualities on multiple scales. Usual
focus is on:
General Knowledge,
IQ testing,
Subject matter expertise (Your undergrad transcripts),
Written and Spoken English.

3. Most of the campus recruitment process and student hiring from schools focuses on measurement of
students on above mentioned abilities. Top 25% percent students who do well in all these aspects
do very well in campus recruitment process. These students are mostly multi-dimensional personalities.
For example in our BS final year campus recruitment process in India, top 10 or so multinational hiring
companies of our times (the ones which also hired students on campus in India in those days) had
multiple levels of testing. They even put out minimum %age bar at 70% in under graduate program for
entry into their "written test" round. Interview and viva-voce measured students on personality
development as well and interview questions used to be from multiple areas including politics, economics,
international, current affairs, sport, science and technology, geography etc. Ranks, Positions, and Scores
were important and so were undergrad transcripts.
2. Specific network hiring: Some jobs would require network and hierarchies build-out. Ladder
system becomes important for reasons such as quota achievement or commission sharing
%ages at “job” levels. Hiring for specific skill-set such as “sales personality”, targeting some very
specific attributes in personalities of job candidates i.e. army background and strict selection
process is very important for such jobs. Important skill-sets are
Links in network
Top performer in “critical” skill set
Background or connectivity in target customer companies or customer groups
Companies which would focus on one or two skills because their work or processes would only
need those skills such as let's say “Spoken English” only (for sure because they don't want
employees to have other skills, skills which would make them qualify for other better jobs..) for
customer support roles or “sales-networking” for network sales jobs are recruiters of this type.
Students who do very well on just these one or two abilities are good target candidates for such
companies or for such jobs. Students from let's say army background, students let’s say from VIP
links, high income full payment students (financial backing and hence can start job just on
commission basis) and creamy layer (bureaucracy links) students for government links do
very well in these kind of jobs. However they might not do very well in academic scoring as they
don’t perform well in all aspects of academic requirements i.e. wouldn't clear 70% bar and don't
do very well in IQ or general knowledge testing and so would not qualify for multination jobs of
last example. During out times 75% of the students would have fallen in this class statistically.
Next job search category is open market job search.
3. Open market hiring: Small companies or companies which could only hire trained employees,
would go out and hire people through job postings, recruitment events, job portals and networks.
Apart from approaching such employers through employee connections and by communicating
directly with HR, you could appeal to such employers if you show up in internet search results
and have
Very good “Resume”
Well written “Cover Letter”
Top “References”
Sharable work such as “Write-up” from and inputs from your performance review reports
Awards and public domain work from your past jobs

4. And last of-course your job network and its type i.e. people you know and point to in case
someone wants “people-names”:
This type of job search almost becomes a necessity for some people such as
a) people from consulting background who would need a new consulting engagement
every two years (good references from past projects and brand of customer
companies would come handy for such job searchers)
b) people who change jobs every 5-6 years and have had relationships in many
companies in industry (would want to explore and find best available opportunity to
them by sending out job search material to connections),
Job search itself as a “skill-set” is critical requirement for such people probably even
more important that workplace relationships i.e. manager-employee relationship or “peer”
relationship. The reason is these relationships are “variable” for such people and would change
every few years but good ranks, education, credentials, research outcomes and references would
become constants and you would always carry them with you. Another highly important
requirement for such folks is good index of public domain sharable “work” and project results.
People who have been in “a” job for longer than 15 years in one place and would want to stay in
similar career track would have developed very specific skill-set by being in such category of
employees. They wouldn’t probably even prefer using this approach for their next job search as
a) they would have very specific and cookie cutter skill-set because of being in a “type”
of job for very long and there are very few “next jobs”(might not even have a public
job search resume)
b) one or at-most two job changes through-out career and most probably because of
some special event at workplace (Probably good friends in similar situation would
come out as a better job search network.)