Today’s Plan:
Making the Hollywood Blockbuster: Screenwriting
Alvaro Rodriguez (Chicago Fire, Machete, Dusk til Dawn Series, Seis Manos, Rust). 6pm. Lindou Auditorium (basement of Michener).
Rock Found Update
WE HAZ EMAIL. And some files.
Professional Presence Project
In addition to our work with the Rock Found, we will spend the rest of the semester working on what I term a professional presence project, which collects all the materials you will need to conduct a successful job search as a professional writer. There’s four deliverables for this project:
- A resume (consult ABO 484)
- A cover letter (ABO 36)
- A website portfolio [Google Sites]
- A linkedin account
Before Thanksgiving, we’ll spend some time in class looking for actual jobs.
Resume Review
I think one of the hardest things about teaching resumes is that everyone believes they know how to make one–that resumes are easy. I want to begin by suggesting that resumes aren’t easy–and that making a quality resume is quite hard. It is hard for a number of reasons, chief of which is that you cannot know, with any degree of certainty, who or what might read your resume. Rhetoric is the art of adapting a message to a particular audience, of recognizing the affordances and advantages of a particular situation. It always involves elements of risk and chance. I believe job searches are particularly arbitrary–there is no system or pattern to what employers look for because every employer, every human resource director, is different, and brings to the process her own preferences, methods, and attitudes. The best we can do is to learn to analyze, listen, and think through possibilities–to be aware of the potential choices we have and to make precise calculations for every position to which we apply. While we can’t be certain, we can do our best to know our audience(s).
What does this mean in practice?First, the resume has to survive the six second scan. Second, the resume has to be designed for both human and machine processing. Third, the resume has to be tailored to a specific job, it has to foster identification between yourself and the organization/company to which you are applying. You have limited space, every word on a resume has to have a rationale for being there. Today, we’ll use keyword searching and some rhetorical analysis to discover some important words to include.
Further complicating the process–the more instructive materials you read on resumes, the more you are likely to encounter contradicting advice.
Let’s start with the six second scan. Research shows that the average HR director isn’t going to spend 5 minutes combing over your resume. A preliminary scan is likely to be 10 seconds or less. A stack of 100 resumes might need to be reviewed in order to produce a list of 6 candidates for phone interviews. No one has 500 minutes to dedicate to that stack. Increasingly, companies are turning to software to vet first-passes (which is why it is so important to stack keywords into your resume–more on this below).
According to the Time article above, TheLadders has 6 principles for maximizing your chances of surviving the six second scan:
- Don’t be creative. “So make sure these six items are easily digestible: your name, your current title and company, your previous title and company, your previous position start and end dates, your current position start and end dates, and education.”
- Put Your Expertise and Skills at the Top. “These are the things that you’ll ultimately be bringing to any new employer, so make sure they’re near the top where a recruiter can easily see them. Use action verbs when describing your accomplishments and back it up with quantitative data when you can. For example, say that you increased sales by 30%, or that decisions you made led to a 150% decrease in operational costs. This is the area where you should feel free to go in depth.”
- Don’t Make it Too Long. “Some say you don’t want to go past one page, but there’s no real harm in going to two pages – especially if you’re older and have much more experience than a kid just coming out of college. Include as much as you can without making your resume appear cluttered.”
- Ditch the Photos. “If you only have six seconds, you don’t want them distracted,” Evans says. So get rid of any photos you may have attached to your resume, and don’t try any video gimmicks. It’ll come off as, well, a gimmick. “You don’t want people focused on your face and not your skills,” he says.
- Don’t Focus on Your Personal Achievements. It’s great that you’ve played the tuba since high school and that you ran a 10K last fall. But don’t spend too much time playing up your more personal info. That sort of light-hearted information is likely to come up in face-to-face interviews anyways.
- Have it Professionally Made. You might be able to skip the first five steps if you follow this one. “I believe there are three things you don’t want to do on your own,” says Evans. “Don’t do your own taxes, don’t write your own will, and don’t do your own resume.” You may want to write the first draft, but consider taking it to a professional for the final touches. While (not surprisingly) TheLadders has resume writing services, there are many others, including Resumes Planet and Your Resume Partners. These services start as low as around $50 and can go as high as a couple hundred. But for around $100 you can generally get a quality edit and even an entire resume written up for you.
As the last paragraph stresses, TheLadders is attempting to promote a service–and I have some questions about their research. But, in general, these are all fine principles for crafting a resume. But the tricky part is that, depending on the specific job advertisement you have, I can think of occasions when I would recommend breaking all of them. The crafting of a resume is intimately tied to the analysis of a specific job ad–and buttressed by research into the company and or person who might be hiring you. What kind of company is this? Who are they looking to hire? These questions concern identification: understanding the identity of your audience and recognizing how you can mark yourself explicitly (content) and implicitly (form, design) as one of them.
Let’s talk about design. Stay in your lane (know what your skills are and what skills you need to exemplify. Maybe you are this person. Maybe you are this person.
Let’s move on to the second difficulty I outline above: preparing your resume for machine reading, or the ATS (applicant tracking system software, see ABO 500-01). Top Resume offers some nuts and bolts:
- Stick with .doc or .docx files when uploading a resume rather than a .pdf (and, if it is a .pdf, make sure it is accessible).
- Don’t use document headers or footers for personal information (including contact information)
- Simple bullets only
- Minimalist design with strong visual hierarchy (contrast)
- Focus on keywords
- Repeat key words
I want to focus on the final bullets here–keywords–because that crosses us over into analyzing a job ad. First, while I’ve already talked about the importance of concision, I also want to stress the importance of repeating keywords–they might appear in your Objectives section and then again in your Work Experience and then again in your Skills section. Even if you are designing for a human, it is ok to be repetitive with keywords and skills. Redundancy is strategic given the rhetorical situation.
I want to look at this article to talk about format, identifying skills, and quantification.
Thinking about the ABO reading:
- Be truthful
- GPA
- Academic clubs-affiliations (494)
Potential section headings:
- Heading (name and contact information)
- Objective Statement (See 496-497)
- Qualifications Summary (Professional Profile, Key Attributes)
- Education (Academic Background, Certifications)
- Employment Experience (Internships, see 498)
- Related Knowledge / Relevant Skills
- Honors and Activities (Professional Affiliations, Volunteer Work, Networking Assets, Awards, Recognitions, Notable Contributions, Publications)
- References (?) Portfolios (We will do this online)
Identifying Keywords, Analyzing Websites, Identifying an Audience
How can we identify keywords? Let’s turn to SquawkFox.
How to frame customer service.
HTML
Think of HTML and CSS in terms of content and form. We use HTML tell a browser about our content, and CSS to tell the browser how to present that content (layout, colors, typography, etc).
We are going to work with bare bones editors in class. Of course, there are powerful programs like Adobe Dreamweaver that make it “easier” to code (because they are doing a lot of the work for you). We aren’t going to go that route, because I want you to learn how to code from the ground up. Learning the fundamental principles of HTML will help you understand how the Internet works and prepares you to learn other languages–CSS, XML, etc. So, to get started, you need to open Notepad++ (if working on a PC) or Komodo Edit or BBEdit on a mac (30 days for free).
The Parts of Speech
HTML languages operate on a simple premise–content gets tagged. Tags open and close. Every piece of content on a page has to have an opening and closing tag. For instance, this paragraph looks like this:
<p>HTML languages operate on a simple premise–content gets tagged. Tags open and close. Every piece of content on a page has to have an opening and closing tag. For instance, this paragraph looks like this:</p>
That illustrates the most basic tag in html, <p> or “paragraph” tag. Don’t read paragraph too literally. The paragraph tag is used for any amount of basic (non-heading, non-listed) text.
Let’s take a look at what some “naked” HTML looks like in a browser. If, in Chrome, we go to view > developer > view source we’ll see something like this:
So, what do we see in that screen capture? Well, we see all of the basic tags. We can think of this as the basic parts of speech for speaking HTML:
- html & head: in lines 2 and 3, the html and the head tag appear. The html tag contains information for the browser. The head tag opens here. When looking at a web page, you can’t see any part of the head (with the exception of the title field). The head provides information for the browser to process the page. Including:
- Doctype: The first line in the code is the DOCTYPE. This tells your browser what kind of code it is looking at. Whenever you start a new page, you can copy and paste this DOCTYPE line. For this class, we’ll be coding in the doctype xhtml 1.0 strict.
- Title: The title tag determines what appears in the tab in your browser
- Metadata: This is information for search engines (lines 5-7)
- CSS: Lines 8-10 contain links to the cascading style sheet and google fonts; this is styling information. We’ll deal with CSS in our next class.
- body: Notice that the head closes in line 13 and the body opens in line 14. The body contains:
- content tags: all the content in a page basically appears in one of the following tags:
- p – your basic paragraph tag. Use this for any text information
- h1, h2, h3 – different headings. The h1 is the page’s main heading, h2 indicates a sub-heading, h3 a more minor heading.
- ul & li – ul opens an unordered list, li puts an item in that list. Lists are a bit more tricky than paragraphs, but easy once you get the idea. Look at lines 29-38 to get an idea of how a list works (the unordered list opens, all the line items open and close, the unordered list closes)
- img – check out line 53 for an example of how to insert an image
- semantic tags – these tags reinforce/augment the meaning of text. It is your basic bold and italics. These tags have to appear within content tags (for an example, look at lines 50 or 55 of this page’s code–first the p opens, then the strong opens, then the content, then the strong closes, then the p closes.
- em
- strong
- cite
- blockquote
- structural tags – throughout this page’s code, you’ll notice the following tags. Ignore them for now–they are structural tags that identify content for styling. Essentially, you use structural tags like the div or span tag to target specific content in your CSS sheet. Depending on how the next few weeks go, we might talk about CSS and structural tags later in the course–but for now you can basically ignore them.
I know the above reading is probably not too helpful for those of you just starting to code; so I want you to try and practice coding a document. Let’s jump into Notepad++, open a new document, and start coding. We need to:
- Open close html
- Open close the head
- Open close the body
- Put a title into the head
- Put a metadata description in the head
- Put a metadata keywords in the head
- Open your sample page, copy/paste all the content in the resume into the body
- Save the file
- Preview the file
- Apply some tags (h1, h2, p)
- Save preview
- Apply some more tags (ul li)
- Save preview
- Apply some more tags (strong, em)
- We are not going to build a fracking table today.
Thursday Nov 14: Rock Found Phase #1 Progress Presentations
I am setting aside class on November 14th for each group to present their Phase 1 progress. Presentations should be 7 minutes (not 6 minutes, not 8 minutes, but 7 minutes). Presentations should be rehearsed–concision is important. Presentations should be accompanied by a Google Slides show.
Presentations should summarize what progress you have made (say 5 minutes) and tell us where you see the group going next (2 minutes). This might be harder for the research group–essentially, you should give us some mini-presentations that synthesize research. That is, don’t tell me about one article at a time. Break the articles into topics/ideas/areas of concern and address those across articles. We can talk more about this. Make sure you include presentation preparation work in your memo!
For Next Class
I’m going to make a slight change to the calendar. Because we have Tammy and Cheryl coming to visit next week, I want you to have extra time to work on your presentations. So Tuesday will be a work day–I will leave you alone to complete progress with your group.
But I am going to reclaim the entirety of Tuesday, November 19th to work on your resumes. Note that copies of your resume will not be due until Monday the 18th.
