ENG 201: Professional Development Project

Today’s Plan:

• Outline Professional Development Project
• Focus on Resumes

Professional Development Project

For the rest of the semester we will be working to assemble materials you will need for a job search. I expect you to produce:

• A job ad analysis
• A resume
• A cover letter
• A web presence with portfolio
• A Linkedin account

This week we will focus our attention on two things: producing a job ad analysis and a resume that fits it. Next week we will work on producing a cover letter for the job ad. Finally, we will develop a personal website with a portfolio of work.

Resumes

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. 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. You have limited space, every word on a resume has to have a rationale for being there.

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.
• 6. 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?

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.

How can we identify keywords? Let’s turn to SquawkFox.

Also: basic resume formats.

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)

Homework

Locate a job for which you want to apply. You may use a job from Project One, or find a more recent and relevant ad using mediabistro.com, monster.com, ziprecruiter.com or any other job site.

Once you have found a job, conduct a keyword analysis to identify 8 words, phrases, skills, etc that have to be included in your resume.

Set up a Google Doc. Title it yourname-professional-workspace. Set the document to “anyone with the link can edit.” Submit the share link to Canvas. This document should contain a link to your job ad and your keyword analysis.

Begin revising your resume. Think about what sections you want to highlight. Think about design.