Getting a job in Bahrain

I've been faced with a lot of people who talk about how hard it is to get a job in Bahrain. Well, not actually GET a job; just getting a good one (there are a lot of crappy jobs out there).

The job process here takes a lot of damn patience, a lot of wasted time and effort, and gives a lot of disappointment, but if you put in the effort, hopefully you will be able to get something reasonable out of it.

First thing you need to work on is your CV. I don't want to go through all the details of how to write your resume, because that's just going to take a long time; but what i'll do is post some of the bigger mistakes i've seen in CV's that people have made:

- DON'T make your resume over two pages; seriously, unless you have 3 PHD's, tons of working experience, multiple awards, etc, no Human Resources manager is going to even bother looking at anything more than a page or two! If you're a recent graduate with one or two jobs of experience, one page is enough. Think of it this way; these guys recieve hundreds of CV's every week, they're not going to take the time to sort out through every single page you have. And if it's too long, they just might throw it in the trash.

- Please, frickin please, check for spelling mistakes! You will not believe the amount of CV's that get sent to HR with "Graduated from Univrsty of Bahrain" and so on. HR people just love to spot mistakes, laugh at them, and throw them out (if they can't do their CV right, you think they're gonna do their job right?). Just please, double check your CV with a dictionary. And a spell check. Oh, and a grammar check would be good too.

- Try to condense things in your CV into main points, instead of sentences. Don't write; I graduated last year in August 2006 from the University of Bahrain, with a Bachelors Degree in Marketing & Management, and a GPA of 3.2. First, it takes too much space, second, the hiring managers don't have time to go through every single sentence you write. Instead you can put:
Univ. of Bahrain, Aug 2002; Bs Marketing & Management (GPA 3.2)
It still passes on the same information, without taking up as much space.

- Please try to make it look neat and tidy! I've seen so many unorganized CV's floating around, where you can't tell what job they had, where, and so on.

Ok, so now you have your CV sorted out, it's time to apply. You need to apply EVERYWHERE. It doesn't matter if you have a specific place in your mind that you want to work at; you're probably not going to get that job, and you need to keep your options open, anyway. Print millions and millions of copies of your CV, fold them up and put them in envelopes, and run around from place to place applying everywhere you can think of, from the banks, to the universities, insurance companies, and so on. When that's done, try applying through email, and through the post. You need to totally penetrate the system; the problem in Bahrain is there's no set standard; some companies aren't advanced enough to look at email job applications, while others will think of paper CV's given in as backwarded and won't consider them, so you need to do it both ways.

If you have specific places you want to apply to, call up, get the name of the HR managers name, and write that name on the envelope you give your CV in with (or in the subject section of your email). This way, it goes directly to the person you want it going to, rather than be forgotten somewhere in the HR department.

Follow up a week later or so, give them a call, speak to HR; tell them you've sent in your CV and if anything has happened - this way, just incase someone has actually missed your CV, you'll either get them to find it and actually look at it, or perhaps they'll ask you to send it directly to them. Either way, it focuses a bit of light on your CV. And trust me, with the amount of CV's being given in every day, you're going to need it!

There are a lot more tips I can give, but again, I can go on with this topic for ages and ages. I hope the above tips help a little! Good luck on getting that dream job! (By the way, i'm not an HR person; I used to manage a branch and people used to come in and give me CV's all the time, so I would have a little laugh sometimes. Mean, I know.)