OK folks. Let’s end the confusion on what makes a good resume here and now. Ed’s seen a bazillion. And if you don’t trust his judgment alone, trust the judgment of editors of top magazines in New York City and the reps at the HR departments of the top magazine companies ‘cause Ed talked to them about what they like and don’t like, too. (Yeah, Ed has boring conversations, but he does it all for you.)
Here you go:
• Keep the thing to one page. When you become editor-in-chief one day, maybe then you can make it two pages.
• Don’t go too wild on the design. It should look good – but not so good that it should be framed. (Not that anyone but your mother wants to frame it anyway.) That means no colors, no funky fonts and no wacky columns and charts. Keep the fonts to ones that you’d see in the body text of a magazine and none should be bigger than 14 point. A common mistake is making your name huge — please don’t. It looks juvenile. Besides, you don’t want to waste all that space—you need it for your experience. Bottom line: Make your resume easy to read, not art.
• Do watch formatting. Ed sees a lot of resumes with funky run-over margins and weird characters. He assumes these are formatting errors (God, he hopes). So if you create your resume in Word on your Mac and send it to an HR rep who only has a PC and an older version of Word, chances are it’s going to come out all screwy-looking when they print it out. Avoid this by saving your resume as a pdf or creating it in a program like Adobe. Also test it — send it to a friend to make sure that when she opens it on her screen and prints it out, it looks as good as it does when you do.
• Do skip the objective statement. Ed doesn’t know why career counselors insist on this ridiculous section. When Ed’s hiring someone, he assumes that s/he wants to work in the magazine industry. It’s like, duh! Where else would you want to work if you’re sending me your resume? Use your cover letter to give details about why you want to work at a particular publication.
• Do stick to a style. Follow AP style—or another style; just pick one and stick with it. You should be consistent throughout your resume. You don’t want to, for example, spell out Indiana in one place, put IN in another, and Ind. in yet another. Editors notice these things. Also italicize all publication titles such as magazines, books, and newspapers. Ed hates it when you don’t! And please don’t italicize random things that shouldn’t be like your title or dates. It’s just weird.
• Put relevant experience first. Resumes should be read chronologically. Put the most recent job first. If your most recent job is not related to magazines or journalism, you can create two experiences sections: One called “Magazine Experience” or “Journalism Experience” and another called “Other Experience” which would include jobs you’ve held that aren’t related to magazines (which would come after the Magazine/Journalism Experience section). Make sense?
• Don’t put your education first. Unless you just graduated. Six months post-graduation, move it after your experience. And always include the date that you graduated: month and year.
• Don’t list your GPA. Listing your GPA just looks juvenile. And Ed hates to break it to you, but everyone has a 4.0 these days (or higher—which is more annoying). You better be able to get an A in a copyediting class or heck, English Lit. Journalism ain’t physics. For the most part, journalism is a trade. So it doesn’t matter so much what your grades are. It matters more what experience you have. If you are compelled to keep your GPA on your resume for six months post-graduation, fine. But please stop after that. And please don’t list every single time you made the Dean’s List (again, everyone makes it). And if it’s not on there, no one misses it.
• Do give context for the publications/organizations you’ve worked for. Because most editors won’t be familiar with the publication or companies you’ve worked at, especially those in states other than theirs, you should explain further the company’s demographic/mission and clearly list what you did there. For instance, (and I’m making this up, but you get the idea):
Indiana Daily Student, Bloomington, IN June 2006 to present
An award-winning daily student newspaper that reaches 40,000 undergraduates and graduates on the Indiana University campus.
• campus writer, write TK stories a week on topics such as TK and TK as well as TK.
• beat reporter, covered the IU Auditorium beat for the paper, writing three stories a week on Tk and TK. One particular story was TK TK TK. …
Btw: TK is “to come” in magazine jargon, as in this information is to come/to be filled in.
• Do be detailed in your job descriptions. This is your one shot to show editors what kind of hands-on journalism experience you have. Say what kind of stories you reported for the school paper or other publication—i.e., “write dozens of campus concert reviews, including one on Rihanna and another on U2” or whatever. Editors want to know how many stories you wrote/reported per issue or per week (or whatever’s relevant) and a detail about one or two that was especially challenging, i.e., “wrote three entertainment stories per issue, including a complex story on student Union Board funding of concerts and operas” or “write press releases for Chevy Street Teams, a Detroit basketball charity; quotes from three releases were later published in The Detroit News.” Smart concise details like this will really explain to me what you did and how you were valuable to the staff.
• Yet, at the same time, do be quick and to the point. This is the eternal struggle of being an editor: detailed yet concise. If you can’t master this on your resume how are you going to master it working for a publication? (Or so goes the editor’s thought process reading your resume.) Bullets are helpful so you don’t have long paragraphs of type. Editors have short attention spans, too. Please don’t use funky arrows. And watch the dingbats font. Sometimes the symbol you choose on your computer ends up being something stupid on ours.
• Do list skills that editors recognize. The stuff that most editors are looking for in entry-level editors/interns is proficiency in the following: LexisNexis (and spell it right! You wouldn’t believe how many people spell it with a “u” or hyphenate it), InDesign or InCopy (because more magazine companies—like Hearst and Time Inc.—have switched from Quark/QPS to this and will value someone who knows how to use it), Quark, QPS, and Excel. List the proper names of software like Adobe PhotoShop or Adobe Illustrator. Also say that you know (if you do!) AP Style and if you speak a foreign language (but if you only “understand” it, just leave that off.)
• Don’t list skills we know you know. You better know how to use Microsoft Word! And editors are pretty sure you can pick up on any email program like Lotus Notes or Outlook. Don’t say it here. Don’t state the obvious to fill your resume. Editors see it as filler and that’s not good.
• Don’t go overboard on the hobbies/activities section. Ed personally likes to see what you do in your spare time in a “Hobbies & Activities” sort of section, but not all editors or HR reps do. If you feel obliged to include, be sure that the stuff you list is relevant to the job you’re applying for. For instance, Ed’s friend was applying for a job at Fitness and she had her certification as a yoga instructor and as a personal trainer—definitely relevant! And if you’re an award-winning pie maker and you’re applying to be a food editor at Rachael Ray, that makes sense. But don’t include it if you’re applying to Vanity Fair. Not sure that Graydon will find pie-making relevant. HR folks warn against including any activities that show a religious affiliation, your age, your sexual orientation or any other factors that someone could use to discriminate against you. It’s fine to include national professional organizations. Stuff like ASJA, SPJ, Ed2010 (natch!), but lay off the long list of titles that you had at your fraternity or sorority.
Whew! Got all that? Good luck.
Xoxo, Ed.
