Résumés or cereals: packaging matters

When the going gets tough, even the tough find it hard to land good jobs. It’s even harder for those not made of sterner stuff.

In a slowdown scenario with all the attendant uncertainty, finding employment requires that extra bit — of skills, luck, connections or a combination of these (ideally all three).

Complicating matters is the tendency for any vacancy advertised during such times to receive an overwhelming number of responses. It is unclear in such situations how much effort prospective employers would undertake to examine each résumé, creating that nagging doubt: Will mine even get noticed?

One is usually told here to imagine an HR person sitting amidst piles of résumés and spending less than a minute to make a decision regarding whether or not to interview you.

What matters, then, is that all the important information on your résumé hits a viewer — in this case, the HR manager — in the eye within 30 seconds.

The right résumé

Consequently, you need to choose the most appropriate résumé format to showcase your skills and expertise optimally for the industry and the job you have applied for. Thus, a one-page résumé may not be bad for an entry-level position in a corporate sector.

For a job-seeker in academia or those applying for senior positions in the corporate world, a curriculum vitae — or long résumé as it is sometimes called — may be more appropriate.

But in recent years, many job-seekers have abandoned the old, staid approach and have begun experimenting with their résumés to make them look distinct and vibrant.

Take the ‘infographic résumé’ that uses a visual timeline. If you want to see such résumés — that resort to things like pie-charts, coloured-tables and Facebook-style timelines — just log on to LinkedIn.

A testament to their popularity is the profusion of websites offering free tools to create such résumés.

Infographic résumés became fashionable from around 2002, especially so in industries like marketing, graphic design and public relations. About five years later, an alternative to it, the ‘video résumé’, began to appear as yet another way to stand out in a pool of applicants. This one has the added advantage of providing the means to ‘showcase’ the applicant’s communication skills and personality.

Show you’re different

The infographic résumé is a classic example of product differentiation, a strategy used by firms to distinguish their products from rivals’ with an objective to appeal to specific groups of consumers.

Since consumers tend to have different incomes and tastes, the same firm may actually create different versions of its product to appeal to these different market segments and, in turn, force its rivals to also create a bewildering range of products.

Hence, Gillette sells several different types of razors and Colgate-Palmolive provides a never-ending flow of products for keeping our dentures in order.

The amusing aspect of product differentiation, of course, is how minimal such differentiation often is in reality. Not many may be able to tell the difference between how Pepsi and Coke taste; yet they will prefer one over the other on being shown the two.

For another example of product differentiation, walk in to any supermarket. Today, there are more than 10 brands offering over 75 varieties of breakfast cereals, including cornflakes, oats and muesli. Twenty years ago, the only option the consumer had was, perhaps, Mohan Meakin’s cornflakes.

Ready-to-eat breakfast cereals are usually differentiated by their sugar content, crunchiness or kind and quantity of fruits they contain.

The majority of Indians, however, prefer spices in every meal, including breakfast. So, unlike in most other countries, in India you will find that breakfast cereals range from sweet to several different types of spicy combinations like pepper and spice oats or masala and coriander oats.

Our basic understanding of product differentiation stems from a seminal paper in 1929 by Harold Hotelling, a mathematical statistician who taught at Stanford, Columbia and the University of North Carolina.

The theory

Imagine the main street of a small town along which all its consumers live. As a firm, where would you like to locate yourself on this street?

For this, you would need to take into account what price to charge and how much consumers would have to spend in travelling to your store, and, of course, the same variables for your rival store(s).

Each firm uses this information, then, to choose where to locate itself in order to maximise profits.

Hotelling’s paper posits this problem in terms of two ice-cream vendors choosing locations on a beach. The optimal choice for both, according to him, is to settle down in the middle and sell at identical prices. One vendor would cater to all the customers to the right of his cart, while the other one would serve all those to the left of his cart!

And here we see Hotelling’s brilliant insight: “. . . distance, as we have used it for illustration, is only a figurative term for a great congeries of qualities. Instead of sellers of an identical commodity separated geographically we might consider two competing cider merchants side by side, one selling a sweeter liquid than the other.”

In other words having narrowed down their product to, say masala oats, in the equilibrium identified above, the two rival forms will produce very similar products and charge similar prices!

Another interesting example of product differentiation pertains to Gulshan Kumar, the founder of the T-Series music company. While it is often alleged that the early fortunes of T-Series were from piracy, Gulshan Kumar’s real success came from selling so-called cover versions of old Hindi movie hits.

In these tapes, the music and the lyrics are unchanged; but unknown singers (named in small print) provided their own rendition of the original songs. It allowed T-Series to launch low-cost, low-quality tapes and sell them much cheaper than the original versions. In due course, Gulshan Kumar also produced ‘covers’ of his own singers thereby effectively pirating himself!

True, the real Kishore Kumar or Mohammad Rafi lover knew the singers were different and wouldn’t ever touch these tapes. But a majority of price-sensitive and not-so-discerning consumers simply didn’t care. To give them the benefit of doubt, their buying could also have had to do with sheer love for variety — listening to different versions of the same song. A case of consumers seeking product differentiation for its own sake!

Postscript

Now, if you are ready to take the plunge and differentiate yourself, visit http://vizualize.me/ and create your own infographic résumé.

And for your next job search, try an experiment: Send some regular résumés and some infographic ones and see for yourself what hits the eye more.

(Sarangi teaches microeconomics and game theory at Louisiana State University, where Jha is a doctoral student in economics.)

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