Valley PR Blog

New Grad PR Secrets Series – Part 1: Resumes

By Dan Wool on April 15th, 2008 In Professional Development

This is the first post of a four part Valley PR Blog series for new grads or young professionals seeking a career in PR — and the experienced professionals who wish to help them.

Part 1: 11 PR Tips for PR Resumes

Your resume is second in order of the materials you present to a hiring manager (after the cover note) but it is the most important document hiring managers look at and pass around to other decision-makers. So, we’ll start there.

Your resume is a PR fact sheet about yourself. It’s the proof – the document that shows you have the qualifications for the job.

But writing about yourself is anything but simple. And, along with cover letters, resumes offer the quintessential PR exercise: how are you presenting information to a specific audience to achieve a specific goal?

In this case, are you presenting yourself in such a way as to get your foot in the door and ultimately get a job? Or, more specifically, how are you taking four years of college and 22 years of life experience (and sometimes inexperience) and encapsulating it all on a single page in such a way as to make the reader not only keep reading but also make a decision to call you for an interview?

It’s not easy. So, assuming you already know the basics, here are ten — no, eleven! – PR tips for PR resume success:

Know your audience. Who is your resume going to? A firm owner? A corporate PR manager? A tech company? An agency? A Monster.com bot? Does what you’re saying match who the audience is? An easy mistake is to assume your resume is final. Never send a general resume for a specific job. Also, make sure to have plain text versions you can easily submit (cut-paste) online. You may need to adapt your resume several times for several different positions. But it’s always worth it.

Think big pitcure. Your resume is a document full of details but it all starts by assessing why exactly the PR organization is trying to hire someone. Who are they looking for and why? And, based on what you know about yourself and your experience to date, what are your competencies and how do you fit in? What is your overall message? Does Hillary Clinton want us to know she’s a foreign policy wonk or that she’s “ready to lead on Day One?” Start with the big picture, then backfill with the relevant facts.

Layout is non-verbal communication. The eye is attracted to that which is visually appealing. Eyes want natural flow. They want to read left to right, up and down. We don’t want to strain. So:
• Use lots of white space – minimum 1″ top and bottom margins, 1.25″ left and right margins. It’s okay to go to a second page if you have a lot of experience and it looks better/cleaner.  Also, white space means white paper – use higher quality stationery paper if you want to stand out – don’t get tricky with colors or card stock. Stick to the basics – black ink on white paper.
• Don’t go smaller than 12 point font – noone wants to reach for their reading glasses.
• Use consistent fonts, formatting and font size – after your name, everything should be the same size. If you bold a certain heading (like a place of business), bold all similar headings. If you have a cover letter, make sure the font matches your resume.
• Align everything along the left side. After your name and address at top, don’t center anything. Don’t right justify your text.

Make it scannable. Along the same lines as above, remember: people don’t read, they scan. For the hiring manager, it’s so many resumes, so little time. You have to grab their attention. Quick. You have about 5-10 seconds to do this before your resume goes in the trash. So, which nuggets will the reader pick out when she scans the page? What words will jump out? On one student resume I recently edited, she had four internships, but each title said “Intern”. Instead we turned it into: Public relations intern, Public affairs intern, Marketing intern, Client services intern. Those broad, highly relevant keywords and experiences will get attention on first scan.

Proofread – because it’s the little things that will kill you. You are going into a job that requires writing and editing skills. Typos, inconsistent verb tenses, periods after some bullets and not on others — these things count. Nothing says “novice” more than if you don’t proofread. In fact, many PR managers will simply toss your resume into the round file if you cannot demonstrate mastery of this. Harsh? Not by a long shot. The thinking is, if you can’t proof your own resume (i.e. personal information you know by heart) how can you be expected to do it for a client? Similarly, if the news media must file clean copy every day, you need to submit clean copy to them.

Keep it short, short, short. If you want to impress a manager, get right to the point, or better yet, get to the drama. Man bites dog. Use bullets. No adverbs. Few modifiers. Active verbs. Use good word choice — words matter. Part of PR writing is editing — so edit. You can always say it shorter. As one client of mine used to say, more Hemingway, less Proust.

Put things in relevance order, not necessarily date order. You should use the “inverted pyramid” writing structure on resumes same as you would a press release. Start with the most relevant and work to the least relevant. On my resume, for example, I have a PR Experience section, which covers my greatest PR accomplishments, and an Other Experience on the second page, which lists lesser positions and a one line description of each. Also, remember that every line tells a story. What story is your resume telling the reader? Are you focused? How are you drawing the reader in and connecting each line to the next?

Don’t just tell me what you did, tell me what you accomplished. Did you just answer the phones during that internship or were you part of a team whose efforts created an additional $10 million in revenue for a certain client? (And, that by the way, is the best place to start: money talks, bulls–t walks. Demonstrate how you helped the firm or client make money). I had an intern develop a clip book and media analysis that was the essential evidence that won the firm the renewal of a key municipal account at a higher retainer rate; the same data and book also helped our firm win a PRSA Cooper Anvil. That’s resume material. But nobody will spin your accomplishments for you.

If you have weak or seemingly irrelevant experience, add a Profile section up top. Come up with three bullets that sum up your qualifications and make sense with your experience and the job type. They can even be unusual, as long as they’re relevant. Just be professional and make me want to interview you. One of the best PR interns I ever had was the host at a pizza parlour before we hired him. He’d had a summer internship at an agency none of us had heard of. But he turned the restaurant job into a positive for the PR position. His resume and cover letter said he was the face of multi-million dollar company, that customers based their return visits on the experience he provided, and that he was responsible and adept at juggling the many simultaneous demands on him. He was also persistent as hell in following up with us. Sound familiar? Sound like a PR guy? He was a no-brainer to hire.

Scrub your MySpace page. Don’t include your MySpace, Facebook or personal presence site in your resume data. And understand that whether you like it or not, employers will Google you and may discover your MySpace or other sites. So keep it clean. When we hit your page and see pics of you drunk and dancing on the table, your image is toast. Have we all been there? Sure. But we’re trying to hire a representative for our companies. That’s not an image anyone wants. (Ask Matt Leinart.) If you must use social media for your job search, use professional-oriented sites like LinkedIn or MyRagan.

No reference necessary. “References available on request” is a given, so don’t include it. When an employer is ready to hire, they’ll ask you for your references.

Share This

Hide Sites

Want Your Picture Icon? Go to gravatar.com and set a picture up to your email address for free. It also works on thousands of other websites, too!