Saturday, April 26, 2008

French Resume?

ESCAE Amiens, France

I come across this from a resume yesterday. What kind of education/ qualification is this? One of my colleagues speaks French, but couldn't help. Can French readers please help?

Resume Writing Skills - Write Things That Make Sense To The Reader
Actually this is not the first time I come across information that doesn't make sense on a resume, at least not making sense to readers who are not familiar with a certain language or geography. Someone wrote "place of birth: Kriv". Where is Kriv? Try not to make the hiring manager guess, write clear and precise information.

In Asia, some universities do not carry an official English name. While you cannot expect every employer read your language, please do your best to translate a name that will make sense to the reader.

Before I recruit investment bankers, I used to do NED searches for listed companies. In one of the searches, client specifically required a Chinese ethinic candidate. One of my top candidates came from this college: 山西矿业学院机械工程系. This college does has a website, however in Chinese only. What I have to do is to write something like this in order to present to the client: Shanxi Mining Technology College, Mechanical Engineering Department.

Jargons on Resume
This is the only exception when you can write things that other people don't undetstand, where "other people" means people who does not involve in the hiring process. You might not know what NED is, but people in my business know. So when you are writing your investment banking resume, feel free to write banking jargons or abbreviations. This is a way to tell the hiring manager that you know the business and the terms. I believe my blog readers should all be able to write these in full: AUM / M&A / ECM / DCM / TMT / FIG / ABS / OTC

In my business, everybody should know: LTIP, RSU, COLA

More resume writing tips from Jimmy Sweeney's Amazing Resume Creator

Resume Writing


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, Anna Maria,

I am Chinese backgrounded graduate student studying in France. I am quite sure ESCAE is short for École Supérieure de Commerce d'Amiens (should mean Amiens Superior School of Commerce) whose web lies here: http://www.supco-amiens.fr/fr/index.php. Only French version, like most of the other French schools unfortunatly.

Since I am also writing English Resumes for jobs outside France, I had doubt in putting my school name. If I write "école centrale de Paris" in resumes, you may be confused, however "Central School of Paris" will not lead you to the website of my school if you google. The International Dpt of my school told me not to tranlate but just put it in French and they assumed that everyone (comprising ones don't speak French) should know what it means. Firstly I was persuaded because even in the English website of my school, they put the French name without translation and the English meaning was quite easy to guess (is that so?). Well, after reading your post, I really want to be confirmed if it is the case. Should I put the English School name on my CV (followed by "a leading French engineering school")or just a French name?

Looking forward to your post and many thanks in advance.

Xinyi

Anna Maria D'Souza said...

Dear Xinyi

I certainly respect your school's recommendation of not translating the school name. However we have to be careful using abbreviations. While many people understands INSEAD or MIT, not everyone understands ESCAE. If you write École Supérieure de Commerce d'Amiens, it is easy to make a guess. People with some basic European language knowledge would be able to guess. But what puzzles me is the abbreviation.

Considering readers who might not read your language, I would suggest to write your original school name and followed by a statement like: "study commerce at secondary level" or "obtain bachelor's degree in commerce".

However for my candidate from a Chinese university, I would still consider translating the school name, because it would be really difficult for non-Chinese to make a guess.