Résumés and cover letters

By Dr. Susan Keith, Rutgers University

Resumes
Cover letters
Clips
References
Journalism jobs
Free tutorial (Scroll down to Resume Tutorial)
Example

Resumes

1. Make sure your spelling is perfect and your editing impeccable. A resume or cover letter containing a spelling error will suggest to the person who receives it that you’re either too unskilled to recognize the error or too careless to correct it. Never send a resume or cover letter without having it looked over by at least one person whose editing you respect.

2. Tailor your resume and cover letter to the specific job you’re seeking. This is a tough market. To get any job, you probably will have to apply for several jobs, which may be very different. You should not use the same cover letter and resume to apply for a general-assignment reporting job, a Web production job and a newsletter-editing job. Each of those jobs requires slightly different skills. Your cover letter and resume should stress different skills for each of the jobs.

3. Limit your resume to one page. Bosses are busy. They don’t have time read lots of multipage resumes and, at this point in your life, you probably don’t have enough accomplishments to fill one up. (Psst, you never will. Even when you have worked for 20 years, your resume should still fit on a single page.) If you need to, you may reduce your type size to 11 point, but try not to go smaller. Remember, the people who will be reading your letter and resume probably have older eyes than you do.

4. Make your résumé easy to read, with plenty of white space and keywords that pop out. Don’t place your name in 60 point. Don’t use five different typefaces.

5. If you’re looking for a job in journalism, forget “objectives.” Many resume experts will tell you that a resume should have a line at the beginning that says something like, “Objective: To obtain a challenging position in sales or marketing that allows me to use my people skills.” Journalism resumes don’t usually have that line, for two reasons. First, journalism job applicants often are seeking a specific advertised job. If you’ve said in your cover letter “I’m writing to apply for the general assignment reporting job advertised in Editor & Publisher on April 15,” it’s already clear what your objective is: getting that GA reporting job. You don’t need to waste space on your resume telling the hiring editor the same thing again. Second, putting an “objectives” section on a resume may tempt you to reveal career goals and dreams that are not germane to whether you’re hired for the job you’re currently seeking. If you write something like, “Objective: To obtain an entry-level newspaper reporting job that will allow me to get the clips I need to move into magazine writing,” you may turn off a hiring editor who wants a long-term employee.

6. If you’re applying for a job in which you would be expected to know Associated Press style, use it in your resume and cover letter. Some resume guides suggest you use formal business writing style, which avoids abbreviations. Before you follow that advice, think about this: If you use AP style in your cover letter and resume, hiring editors will know that you know AP style. If you don’t use it, they won’t know whether you know AP style until they test you.

7. If you have a lot of experience, consider placing your experience before your education on your resume. If you have had several internships as well as student media experience, that will “sell” you better than a degree in journalism, so you should place that experience first on your resume. If you have little experience, put your education first. If you have a double major, a minor or a concentration that directly relates to what you want to do, put your education first. For example, if you’re trying to get a job as an assistant editor for a science newsletter and you have a double major in journalism and biology, you need to let your potential employer know that right away.

8. Place any student media experience you have under “experience,” not under “education.” It’s work. You did it. Don’t downplay it. Editors won’t. This can become an important financial factor if you take a job at a company that has a formal pay scale based on years of experience. If you have a couple of years of State Press experience and you take a job at a newspaper with a formal, experience-based pay scale, you might be able to negotiate a starting salary at the level of someone with a year of professional experience.

9. Tell what you did and when you did it on the first line of each listing in the experience section. Write something like, “Sports reporter, State Press, August 2001-May 2002.” Don’t say just “State Press.”

10. Begin the second line of each listing in the experience section with an active verb. “Wrote five freelance album reviews,” “Designed three issues of a six-page newsletter for a 60-member club” or “Managed the busiest McDonald’s in Mesa” is better than “Five album reviews” or “three issues, six pages.”

11. Avoid clichés, such as “strong leadership qualities,” “ good communication skills,” and “people person.”

11. If you’re applying for a job outside Arizona, think about whether the people you’re writing to will be familiar with the companies or organizations for which you have worked. You may need to refer to the State Press as a 20,000-circulation independent campus daily or Dillard’s as a full-service department store. If you’re applying for a job outside Arizona, be sure to place the state abbreviation (Ariz.) after place names other than Phoenix.

12. Don’t say that references are “available on request.” Include the names, mail addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of at least three references at the bottom of your resume, in your cover letter or on a separate sheet. This is important for two reasons. First, it makes for less work for the person you’re writing. Interest in a resume may fade if finding out more about the candidate is too much work, especially if the next candidate included names of references. Second, if you have chosen your references well, the person who is doing the hiring may know one or all of them and may be inclined to pick up the phone and call to find out more about you.

13. If copies of your work are available online, be sure to include the URL of the website.

14. Name the relevant specialized computer programs you know. Microsoft Word is so common now that should not include it. But if you’re applying for a journalism job, you should mention that you know QuarkXPress. In addition, if you have worked with Excel, Illustrator, PhotoShop or a statistical program like SPSS or SAS, include that on your resume. If you’re applying for a newspaper job and have worked with any proprietary newspaper editing systems, such as DTI, Atex or CCI, say so. If you have used HTML or Dreamweaver to build Web pages, say so. If you’ve used Netscape Communicator or another simple Web page editor, skip it.

15. Print your resume and cover letter on white paper. You can get away with beige, particularly if you’re looking for a job outside journalism. But don’t print your resume on blue paper or paper with pictures of cows on it.

16. If you’re applying for a design job, your resume should look slightly more creative. It should still be on white paper, but you might consider formatting it in Quark to have more control over the placement of white space.

17. Give your résumé the 30-second test. Ask a friend to read your résumé. If after 30 seconds he or she can’t rattle off the high points, you need to rewrite.

18. If you post your résumé online, the most industry-specific keywords it contains, the more likely it is to show up in searches.

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Cover letters

1. Address your cover letter to a specific person if at all possible. You may need to do some research to find out who the right person is.

2. Always make sure you have the correct spelling of the name of the person you’re writing. If you’re answering an advertisement, be sure you check the name by visiting the company’s Web site or by calling the company. Advertisements can contain misspellings; they are embarrassingly frequent in Editor & Publisher ads. (My personal rule is: Call the company and call twice, at different times of the day. You might get a distracted on uninformed receptionist the first time.)

3. Limit your cover letter to a single page. Editors are busy.

4. Use your first paragraph to quickly explain what job you’re seeking.

5. Exploit connections whenever you can. Your letter is more likely to be read and considered seriously if you can make a personal connection with the person you’re writing. The best way to do this is to gracefully note that you and the person you’re writing have an acquaintance in common. You don’t have to be overly coy. Just say something like “My editing professor, Susan Keith, tells me that your newspaper is a great place to learn.” A sentence like this often leads to a call or e-mail to the person you mentioned asking, “Is he/she someone we should talk to?” If you’re preparing to apply for a job in journalism, it behooves you to ask your journalism professors whether they have any connections to the company you’re targeting.

6. Use the rest of the letter to explain specifically what makes you a great candidate. Don’t just rehash your resume.

7. Write simply and clearly. Don’t use $10 words you wouldn’t use in normal conversation. Avoid redundancies and wordiness.

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Clips

1. Send only the best. If you’re responding to a specific ad for a writing or reporting position, it probably will tell you how many bylined clips to send. If it doesn’t, five clips is a pretty standard number. However, if you have only three great clips and several mediocre ones, send just the great clips. Make sure you have someone look over your clips to help you see their shortcomings. Mount your clips attractively on a piece of white paper so that the person who is reading them doesn’t have to unfold and refold tattered pieces of newsprint.

2. If you’re applying for an editing job, clips get tricky because it’s usually impossible to prove that you did the work. Nevertheless, some publications will want to see headlines you have written and stories you have edited. If possible, include a copy of both unedited and edited versions of the story. This is a good reason to hit the print button whenever you start to edit a particularly poorly written story in class, at a student publication or on an internship. You need a record of what the “before” assignment looks like.

3. If you’re applying for a design job, there are several ways to go. Some designers burn and send CDs of their work. Others print out reduced-size color versions of pages they have designed. Still others make pdf files of their work available online.

4. Don’t send your only copy of your clips. Clips are virtually never returned.

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References

1. Choose your references carefully. When your professors or former employers are asked about you, their reputations are on the line. They are obliged to tell as much about you as they know so that the next time the same person asks them about an ASU student, their words will be believed. Almost every semester, a student who has done poorly in my class, has had spotty attendance and has shown little motivation asks me to serve as a reference. That student doesn’t want me as a reference! No matter how good he or she is at some aspect of journalism unconnected with the class I taught, I am obliged to report to an editor my experiences with that student. If I don’t, and the student turns out to be as unmotivated and lackadaisical about attendance at work as he or she was at ASU, then my next recommendation won’t be trusted.

2. Don’t use someone as a reference without getting that person’s permission. This is important for several reasons:

a. First, blindsided references are unprepared. Several months ago, a newspaper editor called to ask me about a former student who had listed me as a reference without asking me. Because the former student had been working as a copy editor and the inquiring editor’s questions were rather general, I assumed the former student was seeking another copy editing job. I began to talk about the former student’s editing skills, which are just average. After several minutes, the editor said he was considering the student for a writing job. I switched gears and praised the student’s writing, which is much better than her editing, but I’m sure my praise didn’t entirely erase the perception the editor must have gotten from my lack of enthusiasm over the student’s editing skills. A year ago, another former student used me as a reference for a campus job without asking my permission. When someone I know very well asked me casually about the student, I had no idea that the question was being posed in connection about the job. I answered, truthfully, that although I liked the former student a great deal, the former student’s work habits appeared to have significant shortcomings. A week later, I found out that my friend had been asking me about the student in relation to a job. Had I known that the student had applied for a job, I could have spent more time discussing the former student’s strengths.

b. Second, you could wind up giving as a reference someone who can’t give you a good recommendation. Professors and employers should be upfront enough with you to tell you what kind of recommendation you will get from them. If you don’t ask their permission before using them as a reference, you won’t know what kind of recommendation you’re getting.

c. Third, you could miss a great connection. A former student recently asked if I would serve as a reference for her when she applied for a job at a newspaper in Virginia. She got more than a reference. Until very recently, my best friend managed the copy desk the student was applying to work on. So I was able to find out the starting salaries of all the recent hires and pass that information on to the former student. That helped the student determine whether the salary she was eventually offered was fair. If she hadn’t asked if she could use me as a reference, the former student would have gone into salary negotiations unprepared.

3. Former journalism employers are better references than professors. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use professors, especially those who taught classes in which you excelled. But whether you worked hard at The Arizona Republic or Phoenix magazine is a better predictor of how you’ll do in another job than whether you showed up every day in JMC 201. You need to realize, though, that some companies are severely limited by legal departments afraid of lawsuits about what they are allowed to say about former employees. Some media companies will do nothing more than confirm that you used to work there. That’s another reason to ask before using a former boss as a reference.

4. Contacting your references should be easy. You need to supply e-mail addresses and phone numbers at minimum. A hiring editor may move on to the next candidate if he or she has to work too hard to contact your references.

Example

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