The paper 'you' and the real 'you'

At NIT Trichy, CV making was more of creating a 3 page "I did all these in life. Hopefully I would not have forgotten most. And yeah, I don't think adding deleting a few details here and there matter much" affair. I remember making my CV then in 6 minutes flat and never modified it even once. However, at an MBA institute, its an altogether different ball game. The reasons are obvious and I would not dwell upon it*. We end up spending too much time making the CV perfect.

However, this post in not on CV making. It is to do with how a person is in real life and how he comes across based on his CV. There have been many a times I have been surprised how those two don't match even remotely. I wonder how. I see really intelligent and smart people with very average CVs and I also see extremely average junta in real life having super CVs. Sometimes it makes me wonder is it the same person represented on paper? They are like split personalities in a sense.

The other aspect about CVs is that it does not tell anything about the 'person' as such. I mean, you can have a superb CV but can be a jerk to work with.

The reasons the above two became observations is that, during initial days, sometimes or many a times, junta here are judged based on their CVs i.e. based on shortlists etc during summers. But as days pass by, the impression one creates in the batch overshadows the information in CV by a large margin. The information asymmetry no longer exists within the batch and each is judged based on the real 'him' rather than the paper 'him'.

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*However, for the benefit of all, 2 reasons why they are more important in MBA instis:

1. There are no written tests. You get shortlisted for the interview based on CV for almost 100% of the jobs. Whereas in engineering, most companies had written tests and many did not even collect the CVs before that. Shortlisting was based purely on performance in written tests. And the interview is mostly technical and less to do with your CV.

2. The variability of pay packages and job profiles is pretty high in IIM A/B/C and hence the opportunity cost of making a bad CV is pretty high. In engineering colleges (non IITs) where there is not too much variability in job profiles and almost all land similar jobs (3-6 LPA for 80% of the batch). Hence the motivation is also pretty low.