When it comes to selling yourself on paper, you will find that newspaper editors are tough customers. After all, they put information on paper every day. There are no bonus points for correct spelling, punctuation or grammar. Those are givens. A single error can consign your résumé to the circular file. Edit your work, proofread the final copy and then double-check everything. Twice. Have someone else go over it. Make sure the editor is NOT the first person to see the finished product.
Understand the purpose of a résumé. It is not intended to get you a job. It is meant to tell the prospective employer enough about you so that they’ll look at your work samples or call you in for an interview. Use the interview, tests, tryouts and other activities to land the job. In a business where word economy is valued, one-page résumés are twice as effective as two-page résumés. Even editors with 20 years and several papers behind them limit their résumés to one page. You’re certainly free to go over that, but it’s not very smart — especially when your experience, in comparison to the editor’s — is modest.
What Comes After Name, Address and Phone Number?
Stating your career objective can help, but only if it matches the opening. An incompatible career objective can eliminate you from consideration. It’s also OK to omit this. Put education or experience next, depending on which is more relevant to the job you’re trying to get. If all of your work has been outside of journalism, but you have a degree in it, lead with the degree and details about your coursework. If you’re completing a non-journalism degree and have two internships at newspaper, list the internships first. Chronological order is less important than relevance.
Go Beyond Simple Job Titles
Describe your jobs. Don’t say you were a reporter. Say you were a reporter who covered a school district, two police departments and the local court and that you wrote a Sunday column. Mention the more complicated, difficult or humorous accomplishments you had in those jobs. These accomplishments distinguish your résumé from others, tell the newspaper something about your interests and abilities and could open the door to an interview.
Use a Clean and Simple Design
Be bold if you can, but not flashy. I have seen cartoon résumés, résumés with little basketballs on them and résumés made to look like front pages. Gimmicks can suggest a lack of experience or sophistication and do not give you any advantage over other applicants. As more and more companies scan résumés for databases, you may want to consider how to make a résumé that scans cleanly.
What About Non-Journalism Jobs?
If you have a short employment history, you certainly may include jobs that are not journalism-related. These help demonstrate that you have worked for others, know how to toil for a living, show up on time and generally be responsible. Stress areas that are most similar to news papering: writing, working with the public, juggling tasks.
What else should I include?
Second languages (but they better be more than the obligatory school minimum), awards, scholarships, extracurricular activities that demonstrate leadership and personal achievements — if they demonstrate relevant qualities such as resourcefulness, tenacity or responsibility. In one case, I was impressed that, while carrying a full load of classes, a student also was a full-time, caregiver for an elderly neighbor.
What About References?
Before you list anyone as a reference, make sure it’s OK with them. Ask whether they can give you a good word. (Once, I called a reference, and the person said, “He listed me? That was a mistake.” The candidate’s chances stopped there.) If your résumé is getting crowded for one page, you can use a second sheet just for references. I don’t think there’s any need to say, “References available upon request.” I assume so.
Omit Personal Information.
It is not relevant whether you are married or single, old or young, a smoker-or a non-smoker. Don’t include those facts. It can mark you as lacking the sophistication to know what’s relevant and what isn’t. My curiosity is piqued when someone’s résumé carries a list of places visited or lived in. Hobbies can intrigue me, too, but they turn others down cold. Generally, the more relevant it is to the job, the safer you are using it. Being accomplished at a musical instrument, for example, implies precision, discipline and practice. Saying that you have a passion for coffees or that you bake bread may turn some people off.
It seems pretty unfair when you think about it. You’ve worked hard in school for some 15 or more years, including 4 or more years in college, all with the plan that once you made it through all that schooling, you would have a good-paying job waiting for you. But now, with the U.S. and global economies mired in the slowdown of a generation and saddled with college debt, you face an uncertain future.
There may be no good-paying job waiting for you. Those who have already graduated and are still searching for a job in your career field know that. And for you seniors graduating in 2009, many fewer good-paying jobs waiting for you. That said, the more prepared you are — and the more you maximize your job-search efforts — the more likely you will be one of the lucky ones who does land a great job.
It’s certainly not the best time to be a recent college graduate or a college senior, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on finding a good job and retreat back home to your family’s basement (since your mom has already made your bedroom into her workout room). Nor should it mean you give up on a job-search altogether and forge on to grad school, hoping by the time you finish your graduate degree the job market will be better.
No. Instead, if you follow the advice in this article, you can increase the odds that you will indeed be one of the lucky few who find a good-paying job. And yes, by the way, these strategies will work in all economic situations — but they will especially help in times of uncertainty.
The job-search advice in this article is separated into tips for those who have already graduated college or
Are about to in December and those who will graduate next spring.
Recent College Grad Job-Search Advice
1. Obtain Job Leads.
The most important activity for recent graduates is finding and developing job leads, defined as actual or potential job openings. The best job leads come from your network of contacts — partly because they are the most current and partly because you may be able to leverage inside information about the job to tailor your resume and interview responses to become a top prospect. Plus, employers favor applicants referred to them.
If you don’t have a big network (and everyone’s is bigger than you first think), or you don’t have many contacts in a certain industry, occupation, profession, or location, one of the most underutilized tools — especially for new grads — is the informational interview. As the name implies, it’s a meeting in which you seek information (and further contacts and potential job leads) from the person you interview. Informational interviews are a powerful resource and should be a key tool in your job-search plan.
While informational interviews are about expanding your network, enough cannot be said about the many positive outcomes from this technique. Many former students who have conducted informational interviews have eventually received job offers as a direct result of their informational interviews. In fact, one out of every 12 informational interviews results in a job offer. That’s why informational interviewing is the ultimate networking technique, especially considering that the purpose of informational interviewing is not to get job offers. Read more in our Informational Interviewing Tutorial as well as my Career Doctor response: What are informational interviews –- and why should I do them?
There are, of course, a number of other ways to generate job leads — and you should try to incorporate many of them in your job-search. For more details, read this article: 10 Ways to Develop Job Leads.
2. Polish Personal Branding.
The next activity to tackle is developing — or putting some sparkle — on your personal brand. While you can’t really change the experiences you have had at this point, you can position them more strategically — while sharpening how you express that experience on your resume and in job interviews.
While business and marketing grads might have a bit of a leg up on the lingo, the underlying fundamentals of personal branding is simply to make you a more attractive job prospect to employers. This process involves not only re-examining all of your previous experiences (full- and part-time work, volunteering, class projects, work-study), but also researching each potential employer to understand the organization’s needs and package yourself to be the perfect solution to solve their employment needs.
You don’t need to be a business graduate to build and sharpen your personal brand. We have all the tools you need, including a tutorial, in this section of our site: Personal Branding and Career Self-Marketing Tools.
3. Never Stop Your Follow-Up.
Remember how you kept hounding that one professor to raise your grade — how you would not take any other answer because you felt you deserved the better grade? And remember how it worked? The same holds true for job-hunting in the sense that the job-seeker who regularly follows up with prospective employers — continuing to build your case and express interest and fit with the organization — will be given the most serious consideration.
Yes, it’s true that you have already invested quite a bit of time and energy — obtaining job leads, writing and polishing your resume, preparing for interviews, and taking part in the interviews — but sometimes the difference between getting called back for another interview and getting eventually rejected is follow-up.
Follow-up starts before you even get called in for an interview by contacting the hiring manager (after you have applied for the position) to ensure he or she has all the information needed to make a decision. Follow-up starts after the interview with a thank-you letter to each (yes, each) person who interviews you and continues later with calls or emails to the hiring manager
to highlight your fit and continued interest in the organization. (As hiring decisions lengthen in duration, staying in touch with the hiring manager becomes even more important.)
