Today’s Plan:
- Professional Presence Project
- Resume Review
- Reading a Job Advertisement
- Homework
Professional Presence Project
For the rest of the semester we will be 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
- A cover letter
- A website portfolio [Google Sites]
- A linkedin account
Of course, we’ve already started working on these materials and will continue to develop them over the last two weeks of class. Over the weekend I’ll ask you to read about cover letters. A draft of your cover letter will be due Saturday, April 20th at midnight. We will peer review letters in class on Monday the 22nd. On Wednesday, April 17th, we will work with Google Sites. I will show examples of portfolios. We’ll put together linkedin accounts on Wednesday April 24th. My expectation is that you should have all four of these deliverables finished before the start of exam week.
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.
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.
Here’s a second reading on surviving the six second scan.
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.
Homework
Conduct a rhetorical analysis of a website for your job ad (assuming one is available). If possible, visit the place to do some on-site scouting. How are people dressed? What kinds of posters are on the wall? See if there’s any social media presence (are they on facebook, twitter, linkedin?)
Read ABO on cover letters, 36-41.
