lifehacker.com: There are a few things you can do with your resume to beef it up, no matter what you've done—or haven't done. If you're worried you don't have any references, or the references you do have might backfire on you, we can help you out with that, too. Let's turn that quarter-page resume into something that can help you get a job.
6 comments:
This article has a lot of good advice for someone writing their first resume. This article would have been ten times more useful five months ago when I was making my first resume. Even if it is not your first resume it is still helpful for what you should and should not include. I have seen people with resumes that are way too long and have information irrelevant to what they are applying. I think keeping your resume short, sweet and to the point is one of the nest qualities it can have.
This is a great article! There are so many times when I hear people complaining about how they have nothing to put on their resume when they actually have a ton of stuff. When thinking about what you should put on your resume think of all the things that you have done that have given you valuable experience. That is what should go on it. The only people that have nothing are the ones who have done literally nothing.
This is really an interesting article. I always just figured that resumes were lists of the things that you have done. I guess because of the environment I grew up in, I kind of already knew how to make a resume, and had done so multiple times, before I actually had to make one for real use. There is so much that we do all the time unless they have actually done nothing in their lives (I do know some of these people). I'm sure most people have gone to a summer camp, or volunteered at some sort of event. Those are all things that you can put on your resume. I would suggest to people just starting in life that they should get involved with a big organization that most people know about, like Girl/Boy Scouts, 4-H etc, because if they recognize the name then they will most likely know the values behind the organization. That can only help you. Also, if you stick with one place for multiple years, it shows that you have dedication. Switching to a bunch of different companies each year could hurt you as much as it helps.
I can see how volunteer and school work can be relevant to a resume but I agree with one of my professors who mentioned I should soon remove high school work. Without it though, at the moment, I do not have much other items to list. On one hand I feel like I have had many experiences in theatre, but on the other hand, I feel like on paper many of them may not matter much to a professional organization. I have met with the Career and Professional Development Center counselor for Drama, Elaine Stolick, and she was very helpful in restructuring my essay. More so though, she was very helpful with my cover letter; something I really didn't know much about writing. The part about keeping up with your references is very true and something we talked about in Meta Skills. If you're not actively looking for work, I think it is a good idea to send a note to the references you intend to use before you start applying again just to make sure they are still willing to speak well on your behalf. The article does make a good point that maintaining a good relationship with your reference is really the best way to have someone who will speak strongly on your behalf. I agree with the short resume idea. I believe at this point, we really do not need more than one page to communicate our experience and connections. In high school, when I was applying for colleges, my resume was two pages, but looking back it seems excessive. When I was tweaking my current resume, I found the senior and grads resumes on the Showcase website very useful and informative about different styles and what works and doesn't work well.
I wish there was more written about writing resumes in our industry. There's usually more space to put projects, because when someone says "ASM" you automatically know what their duties were, whereas, my "real world resume" only has four or five jobs on it and already feels cramped.
I also still have no idea how to evaluate a resume if someone shows it to me. Part of my job last summer was screening candidates for an associate director position at a NFP, and I ended up basing it primarily on whether they had NFP experience, there were typos and if their formatting was absolutely atrocious. Perhaps this whole process would be easier if there were more guidance (in the world at large, not just CMU) on how to READ resumes for content, so that we can better edit our work.
I wish I had seen that article a few months ago when I sat down to write my resume. A lot of the tips in it were really good, and the most important one was probably about keeping things brief. It's so easy to fill up a page once you start writing, but it's so important not to bore the person reading it. When Dick was helping me, that was one of the things that he stressed the most. At this point I have a decent looking resume, but it doesn't look like a theatre resume. At some point I'm going to have to reformat it and make it look like one, and when that day comes I'll be totally lost. As Lindsay said above, i would be great if there was more out there about making resumes in our industry.
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