CHAPTER 1

Let’s Begin

 

 

Let’s begin with the one thing that we all know and understand very well and that is-

This is the age of Competition. Extreme Competition.

For every job and a B-school seat out there, there are thousands of candidates. Each one of these thousands will try his very best to be the chosen one, the selected one. Beating the competition is the name of the game.

So, exactly when does this competition start? When does the race really begin? Does it begin when you apply for the job/seat or does it begin when the job or the admission notice is advertised?

Well, you will be surprised to know that the competition begins much before all this.

It begins the minute you decide what it is that you want to do. It begins the minute you decide what job you want, what profession you want to make your own or which B-school you want to join. YOU decide which race you want to run. YOU begin your own race.

 

But, the trouble in these times is that you can no longer depend just on your academic qualifications to give you a good job, a good life. Those days are long gone when there were very few people with high academic qualifications and they were sure of a good life just because of it. Qualifications are no longer a guarantee for getting a dream job because they are no longer a rarity. Look around and you will see that now practically everybody is qualified in some field or the other. The number of engineers, computer professionals, business school graduates, designers and dental surgeons and all other manner of professionals floating around is stupendous. Almost everybody is at least a graduate if not a post graduate. And all these people are looking around for jobs.

Yet recruiters say that there just isn’t enough talent in the job market and good employees are very difficult to find. Recruiters spend so much energy, money and time on selections, go through such long and exhaustive selection procedures and yet often are not happy with what they get. They exercise careful thought in matching the candidate to the job, put to use many principles of human resource management, human resource development and yet there is so much attrition, high labor turnover in every industry. Putting the facts together that employers find it difficult to find good employees despite the fact that there are so many qualified but unemployed people out there, brings us to a thought that something more is needed. What is that ‘more’?

Let’s work on a very possible situation that a job has been advertised and you have applied for it. Let us presume here, that at least a total of thousand people have applied for this job, out of which you are one. Now, those other 999 people are not fools. The very fact that they have applied for this job means that they too have the required qualifications asked for in the advertisement. Your qualifications can help you only till here that you can apply on the basis of it. It will not help you actually get the job from among these 1000 candidates. Now think - why should the recruiters select YOU and not any of those other 999 candidates? What is so special about YOU? What is that something extra that you have to offer that all those others don’t have? Everyone has the same qualifications and yet only one will be ultimately chosen. This means that apart from the basic academic qualifications, every company has some ideas, certain norms and standards for how they like their people to be and the selected one will have that X-factor which will be missing in the others. Therefore, the question of your concern here is - What is that X-factor?

This ‘more’ and the ‘X-factor’ is a winning personality. Your personality has to be so attractive that the recruiters feel compelled to select you above all else. Your personality should shine through so bright that the selectors cannot even consider not taking you. This winning personality is strong yet not overpowering, pleasant yet not too easily malleable, confident yet not arrogant, stunning yet humble. A winning personality has a spark that stays ignited and energy that is always charged! A good personality makes you stand out apart from the crowd and draws positive attention towards you. Therefore, the fact stands understood that what you need to do in order to win your race is to develop your personality along with gathering academic or technical qualifications.

But, what is personality?

Is it just one concept or is it made up of several aspects? Can it be broken down into smaller elements? How do we develop it? What are the areas that we need to take care of? How do we go about it? What do we do?

Well, personality is a complex concept and a sum total of several aspects put together. But, when broken down into its several elements, it is not so difficult to understand and developing it becomes a fairly reasonable task. As you read about it, you will realize that developing your personality will help you in not only getting a good job but it is something that you will be proud of throughout your life. It will always help you in making a good impression on people around you and the confidence gained will result in you enjoying your life to the fullest. These elements are many and each person will need to concentrate on different areas because of existing individual differences. The main areas are –

• Motivation – All the points below and the zeal to cultivate them will depend on how motivated you are, how hungry you are for success. Are you just a passive person for whom a mediocre life with mediocre job and mediocre money is enough or do you want to shine! Exactly how much fire do you have? How far do you want to go? What heights do you want to scale? How high do you want to raise the scale of your personal excellence? The efforts you put in will be directly proportional to how much you want to achieve. And this will show up in your personality.
• Knowledge – It is no point being physically smart, well groomed and to have excellent language skills if you don’t have anything to say! There is no guarantee that the topic that you will be given for the group discussion or the questions you will be asked during the interview will be exclusively from your subject field only. You may be very well prepared in your subject but if you are not generally informed about things happening around you in the world, you will come across as dumb and selectors will very quickly lose interest in you. In comparison to a competitor, if your speaking skills are a bit poorer but knowledge levels are higher, you stand a better chance of winning.
• Communication skills – A little below the mark physical attributes and grooming are soon cancelled out by very good communication skills. Your speaking skills should be so good that as soon as you open your mouth, the attention of all the people around you gets locked onto you. The more captivating your speaking skills, the better are your chances of getting selected. When you speak really well, people no longer notice your clothes, your grooming etc. and they become secondary. For certain job profiles which involve a lot of face-to-face interaction and customer interface, communication skills take the primary position in the list of skills desired in a candidate.
• Grooming – Whatever physical qualities you have been blessed with naturally can always be further improved upon with good grooming. A dirty, untidy and uncared for look can turn people off despite your other positive qualities. To be well turned out shows that you give importance to the basic virtues of cleanliness and neatness and also that you respect the sensibilities of others.
• Body language – A staggering 80% of our face to face communication is via body language making it an important aspect of our personality. Although this could be a part of communication skills but since most of it is involuntary and because it plays a huge role in interpersonal interactions, it makes sense to study it separately.
• Etiquettes – Nobody likes boorish, ill-mannered and rude people. All your other qualities will be immediately cancelled out if you don’t have manners and etiquettes. Good behavior is an absolute must.
• Positive attitude – If you make all the efforts to better yourself with an underlying thought that nothing is going to come of it then nothing really will come of it all. You have to have a positive attitude that yes, if I am putting in all these efforts and if I am doing everything right then good things will happen. The power of positivism is immense and will open doors that you didn’t know existed in places where you never deemed possible. This will not only get you the job or the college seat but also make you a successful employee since you will be open to challenges and not afraid to tackle problems.
• Confidence – When you know you have the knowledge and the communication skills to match, you are well groomed and can behave, there will be no reason not to have confidence in yourself. When you feel confident, everything feels right, you are able to pay full attention to others and what they are saying because you are not busy being nervous.
• Belief – Besides all above, belief is a big factor. Till the time you don’t believe in yourself and in your capabilities, nobody else is going to. When you believe in yourself, you exude the feeling through the way you talk, the way you carry yourself and through your body language. The people who you are communicating with pick up these signals and they too feel positive about you. Hold your head high, throw back your shoulders, stand tall and face the world with all that you have.
• Health – When you meet someone for the first time, the absolute first impression is visual which includes physical condition, body language and attitude. Physical condition depends on the kind of health and body you maintain. Take good care of your health and try to keep it world class. Good health will give you stamina and a good base with which to fight the odds in life. Learn to eat well by choosing wholesome foods over fast foods, exercise as per your age, sleep enough hours in a day, stay away from smoking, drink moderately if at all and enjoy the outdoors. A healthy mind loves to live in an equally healthy body and a healthy body gives you confidence and a good personality.

In the chapters ahead all these and much more will be dealt with in detail. Explanations and methods of improvement for each will be outlined. There will be plenty of tips and pointers. Of course one does not expect you to learn all of them by rote. You will feel well rewarded for your efforts if you read the chapters again and again over time and each time pick up something new, something more. You have to gradually make them a part of your everyday way of being and behavior so that you look natural, effortless and polished. This sophisticated smoothness needs lots of practice. Daily and dedicated efforts will take you there.

The other challenges

Now, here’s another thought-

Your challenges don’t begin and end only with the number of people running your race. There are other challenges too to be dealt with and those are from the selector’s end. The selectors do not have the time to minutely go through all those thousand biodatas or give a second chance to any of those candidates who didn’t perform well in the first round of group discussion or to interview every single one of those thousand candidates who have applied for the job. Any tiny mistake, any small irritant, any minor detail overlooked or any aspect of your performance that is not up-to-the-mark or others performing even better than you can get you eliminated instantly. There are so many others to choose from! Somehow the large numbers have to be reduced to a more manageable number.

So the irony is that, what should actually be the Process of Selection has now become a Process of Elimination! Since there are so many applicants and the selectors need to reduce their numbers to a more manageable lot, you are no longer fighting to be selected, you are fighting not to be eliminated!

What will help you here? How will you ensure not getting eliminated in the initial rounds itself? How to prepare exactly as per the requirements of the selectors? What are the issues here? Well, the main issue is of ignorance.

• Ignorance of what do they want.
• Ignorance of what is expected out of you.
• Ignorance of the latest trends in the industry.
• Ignorance of the right and wrong kind of behavior.
• Ignorance of what you should do and what you shouldn’t do.
• Ignorance of what aspects you are evaluated on and you are not even aware of them!

What are you to do?

How are you going to deal with all these issues?

 

The answer is simple.

• Would any athlete go to a race without practice and preparation?
• Do you think our cricketers just go out there and play matches without practicing during the other days?
• Do you think actors just get up and deliver their dialogues so effortlessly without any rehearsal beforehand?

No! They don’t.

Well, so shouldn’t you.

 

You must prepare yourself and prepare yourself well. Preparedness is the key factor that is going to help you to cinch that job, that B-school seat. Preparedness is what is going to help you deal with the selection procedures and come out a winner. The groundwork or the preparation that you do will take you where you want to go.

Therefore the quality of preparation should be as high as your dreams. You need to understand the fact that the hard work and the sacrifices you put in will benefit no one else but you. You are doing it all for yourself. Yes, it is understood that youth is the age to enjoy and have a good time too, but, this is also the age to lay the foundation for the rest of your life. The time spent in enjoyment and the time spent in preparation should be balanced so that you do not regret later on in life. No one likes the feeling of painful regrets. There are some aspects of life for which there is only one ideal time and that is youth. If this time is lost, it will never be regained. You can study about how to keep this balance by reading about time management in chapter 8.

 

Your next obvious question here is – so how do I prepare myself?

The answer is – Identification.

You have to clearly identify—

• What is it you want to prepare for?
• What are the specific skills required here?
• What are the areas you are weak in?
• How are you going to strengthen yourself in these areas?
• What kind of behavior is expected out of you?
• How should you present, carry and manage yourself in front of the selectors?

Selection procedures for most good companies and B-schools have broadly three elimination techniques —

The Biodata screening or the Written test

Biodatas are screened and only those people whose biodata does not get eliminated are called in for the next round. For some very technical job profiles, most companies also conduct written tests for screening out the undesirable candidates and have a cut off percentage to be achieved in these tests. These are mostly aptitude/ logic/reasoning tests. B-school hopefuls will obviously have to clear the entrance tests.

Group Discussion

Further eliminations are done during Group Discussions. Scoring well in the G.D. is essential to reach the Interview round. Getting eliminated here would mean a chance lost forever and not even getting the opportunity to give the interview and prove yourself.

Interviews

There could be several rounds of interviews or there may be just one round. It depends from industry to industry and company to company.

Therefore to prepare like a winner, the dynamics of each elimination round have to be understood and optimum preparation has to be made for each of them. But, before we go ahead and prepare for the individual rounds, there is one absolutely essential detail that you need to look into and that is – Pre-preparation. This will be your groundwork, your foundation for all the rounds of selection. So stronger your pre-preparation, stronger your foundation and better the chances of your winning.

Understanding life skills

Moving ahead in life you will need to comprehend and accept another essential fact that once you get the job or the B-school seat, the race does not end there. It’s not as if then onwards you don’t need to continue developing skills and improving yourself. In fact, you have to keep growing and keep becoming better and better. There are certain skills that will help you get what you want initially but they cannot be discarded after that. These skills will help you throughout your life and make you a better person, a better organizer, a better manager of your life and work and help you gain maximum returns from your efforts. These skills are Life Skills. Their practice is valuable throughout life. They should be internalized so completely that they become a part of your nature, a habit. These are lessons learnt for life.

Some of these lessons and skills are -

• managing time
• managing stress, pressure and anxiety
• communication skills and public speaking
• social, business, dining and telephone etiquettes
• setting goals and priorities
• positive thinking and positive attitude
• enhancing knowledge on a continuous basis

There are many more and these will always be your loyal companions in your everyday life, all through your life, helping you to work to the best of your capabilities, reach professional heights, enjoy personal and family life smoothly without any clashes and discomfort i.e. help you create a work-life balance which is necessary for a peaceful and productive life in these hectic times.

Now-a-days, student life and young professional life is so busy and full and crowded with to-do’s and achieving things, it is not always possible to absorb these life-lessons in the normal course by observing, analyzing, ruminating and internalizing i.e. learning the natural way.

This is where this book comes in. This book will take you through some of the most essential life skills by explaining the concept, their importance and how to make them a part of your way of being, your character and personality in the simplest ways possible. But, what is written ahead is what you need to read first and really understand.

How to create magic in your life

Half the success is in actually laying out your dreams. A surprising number of people go through an entire lifetime without any tangible dreams that are close to their heart. Just being provided for and living a reasonably comfortable life is not a life of dream achievement. It is rather living a life along the lines laid out by the most basic precepts of societal living. When you have a dream, however big or small, you live a life of passion, removed from the ordinary. And when you fulfill that dream, your life is counted as extraordinary.

And the other second half is in believing. There is magic in belief. If you think you can do something you will definitely be able to do it and if you think you cannot, then you most definitely will not. Your thinking has great power on the outcome. When you think you can, everything inside of you is tuned towards success. All your efforts will bring forth results and everything will seem possible. Believing that you are going to be a success for sure will radiate confidence from you and create a favorable image in the minds of the people around you. Then, they too will feel that you are going to succeed and respond accordingly. This positive thinking will have a direct effect on your actions, efforts, body language, dedication and energy. You will feel energized and eager to put in the required hard work. Therefore it is very important to harness this power of positivism of your mind since it has a direct effect on the outcome.

But, when you think you cannot, it is as if you have handicapped yourself right in the beginning. All your efforts will be made half heartedly with the thought that nothing is going to come out of it all and thus, nothing will. This means that it is your thinking that decides the results i.e. positive thinking brings forth positive results and conversely, negative thinking brings about negative and failed results.

There already are so many factors in your environment to struggle against to achieve something. Why add one more? Why pitch your own self against your own efforts by thinking negatively and having no faith in your dreams and your capability to make them come true? As it is there will always be some people who don’t believe in you, why be one of them? If you have set your targets according to your capabilities and if you are willing to put in all the efforts sincerely, there is no reason to not succeed.

Of course, it is nice to have a good team of cheerleaders backing you up, so, tell your dreams to the people you are emotionally attached to. Their support and their cheering you on will give you strength. They will take care of you whenever you feel disheartened and put you back on your path. They will rejoice with you when you reach your goals. Their positivism added to yours will bring about magical results!

So, learn to maintain a positive frame of mind. Do not be afraid to make mistakes as mistakes only teach us to do better. Do not be afraid of failures along the way as failure teaches us to analyze what went wrong and how to do it differently the next time. By making a mistake or by failing we learn how not to do things, how they cannot be done and thus, then we explore new methods, new paths. Mistakes and failures are, in a way, teachers; they help us grow. They help us see our shortcomings and rectify them. Take every mistake, failure or misadventure as a learning experience and keep going. Keep trying out new ways of reaching where you want to reach. If one path does not take you to your destination, there are others that will. Just don’t accept defeat. Study the lives of great inventors and achievers and of some highly successful people and you will find one teaching that is common by all – Never give up!

On the road to success you probably cannot see beyond a few steps, but the fact is that the first step is the most important step of all. If you don’t even begin, how will you finish? If you don’t start, how will you reach the finish line? Begin your journey with courage and faith and everything else will fall in place. Do not be worried if you don’t know what is to be done beyond the first few steps because once you begin, the way keeps opening up by itself.

Faith in self

Within this big wide world, you have a small world of your own and YOU are the Hero of it, the axis and the centre of it. Of the film of your life, you are the story writer, you are the director and you yourself are the hero. It is in your hands to make it what you want it to be. A hero never accepts defeat, never sits down with resignation and says what will happen, will happen. The hero fights with all that he has and if one thing doesn’t work, he always finds another way. He has faith in himself and in his capabilities and therein lays his greatness, his heroism. This is exactly how you have to live your life because you are the hero of it. If you won’t do all that needs to be done to live your life to the full, who will?

The most common observation is the lack of confidence. Lack of confidence is a result of the belief that you know less than others. You think you know less than others because you are aware that you have probably not worked hard enough. So, conversely, if you work hard and prepare sincerely, you will have that game changing faith in yourself. This faith will open doors where you didn’t even think there were any and help you reach your goals. The taste of achievement and success is sweetest when it is begotten with hard work and dedication.

So, have faith in your choices, your chosen race, your priorities made and the efforts you are making on the path towards your goals. Dreams do come true, provided you have seen them with open eyes and have dedicated yourself towards them. If you won’t, who will? Nobody will come and offer you a life of your dreams on a platter. But nobody can prevent it from happening too if you are completely tuned towards it. So, just go out there and do it!

How to get the maximum from this book

This book is divided into two parts –

Part One - deals with the job selection procedures and here you will learn how to prepare and groom yourself, write a winning biodata, how to participate in group discussions and perform in interviews.

Part Two - deals with Personality Development. A well developed personality helps build character and forms a solid base on which you can build yourself professionally.

The question here could be – Why is there a detailed personality development section in a book dealing with group discussions and interviews? And the answer is – because giving group discussions and interviews successfully is like laying the roof of a building. And everybody knows that before you lay a good roof, you have to have strong pillars and walls standing on which to lay the roof! How and where will you lay down a roof when you have no pillars and walls? Developing various facets of your personality will be like building these pillars and walls right down to the foundations. You will gradually learn ahead that these firm foundations of a good personality are what will make the scary selection procedures seem easy to tackle.

You will also note that some bits and pieces are repeated more than once in several chapters. This repetition is meaningful. This either shows the various facets of that particular activity or emphasizes the importance of it. For example, the fact that you need to improve your general knowledge levels will come up in several chapters. This is because it really is very important and the repetition reminds you of it.

Combining the learning of both sections together, doing the recommended exercises and faithfully following the suggestions made here, will produce in you an individual who is confident, strong, knowledgeable and able to deal with any situation to emerge as the winner of the race you are running and also a person who will find life a pleasant race to run and that it is not necessarily the proverbial rat-race.

So, let’s begin and tackle Pre-preparation first in the next chapter, then we will move ahead.