Dear Ed,
I've had three internships and I'm going to be applying for editorial assistant jobs soon. My resume is two pages long. Is it okay to send it out as is, or do resumes have to be just one page?
Thanks,
Jennifer
Hi Jennifer,
People who have had multiple internships should keep their resume to one page, just like everybody else. If deputy editors with ten years of experience still have one-page resumes (and they do), then interns can. That isn't meant to downplay internships; you just need to be selective about which duties at those internships you highlight. Being
an editor is about getting a lot of meaning and context into very little space. Think of whittling down your resume to one page as your first true editing assignment. It's just as much of a "clip" as the story you wrote for your school paper.
Your resume should change as you get more and more experience. Ed's resume used to include all of his internships, but now that he's had post-college jobs, he leaves off some of those internships and doesn't mention any of the non-mag jobs he's held. And the descriptions of the responsibilities at the internships Ed lists are much shorter now than
they were when he was applying for editorial assistant positions.
You can take a chance submitting two-page resumes. If your experience is great and well-presented, an editor wouldn't eliminate you from the running just because of a longer resume. But every single two-page resume Ed's seen (and Ed's seen many!) had careless errors in it or, at the very least, obvious opportunities where they could have been shortened.
If you're interested in getting your two-page resume down to one, try this:
Tinker with the margins. Leave some space at the bottom, but you only need to leave a bit on the sides, and even less at the top.
Make the font smaller, but aim for 10-12 point fonts.
Change the font. If your resume is in Courier, make it Times or Arial.
If you have an "objective" line, eliminate it. Your objective better well be to get a job at a magazine!
Put commas in between each of your job responsibilities, so the description looks like a paragraph instead of a bullet-pointed list.
Bullet points look great, but they take up more room than flowing text.
Cut administrative tasks like "made copies, fetched coffee/lunches, answered phones, sent faxes, arranged for messengers," etc., unless you had zero editorial responsibilities at the internship (but you probably had some. Answering reader email and reviewing unsolicited manuscripts count.)
Delete college activities not related to magazine journalism. Yes, it's possible that a hiring editor might have also belonged to your sorority, but if your resume is running long, this is a good place to cut.
Don't list any high school activities if you're a junior or senior in college, unless it was something truly outstanding like, "Wrote a true-life story for Seventeen."
Cut internships/jobs that aren't magazine-related. You can leave PR, marketing, advertising, and other media experience, if you have space or no other types of internships, but "manager at the Orange Julius" must go.
You don't need to make separate sections like "Internship Experience," "Other Relevant Experience," and "Other Experience." If it's not relevant, delete it, and if it is, put it all under one section called "Experience." You can make it clear that the experience was an internship when you list your job title, "Editorial Intern."
Delete your references. Editors will ask for them when they want them and it's highly unlikely that anyone will call your references before interviewing you, when you'll have your chance to provide them.
If you're still running over one page, get rid of your skills section. You can work in that you used InDesign, Quark, or Powerpoint in your internship descriptions (eg. "Fact-checked feature story and entered changes in InDesign"). Everyone knows MS Word and how to send a fax so you don't need to say that you do, too. But if removing this section doesn't feel right, then leave it in.
If you interned at the same place twice, don't list the internship twice. Just include the additional dates where you've been writing your dates of employment. If you had two separate internships, say, fashion intern and features intern, use the name of the publication as a heading, and put "fashion intern: responsibilities, dates" underneath, then "features intern: responsibilities, dates" underneath that.
If you're still stuck, and you're a college student, get in touch with the Ed on Campus people to submit your resume for review. If you're not a college student, you can submit your resume for a critique by Ed, himself.
Love,
Ed
