A Little Resume Help

Mustang-- Dodge/Burn refers to a specific photoshop technique used to bring out different colors or highlights in a photography through layer blending. It's not a journalism vocab phrase per se, but if you know photoshop you'll probably know what it means.

FNF-- I guess that's great, but for someone like me who has a lot of technical skills that he wants to showcase, I'm not sure I can practically include that in a succinct resume, even if I do agree it would be great to go into further depth about what exactly my skills are within the framework of the skills I've listed.

 

You can always go into greater detail with your cover letter -

--- ever given any thought to the idea that it might be your cover letter that needs revamping ---

 

An interesting thought, Cubby. I usually tailor my cover letters to the posted requirements of the position, but re-thinking how I approach it might be a good tack to take.

I wonder if anyone's seen any good cover letter advice floating around the 'net...

 

I like the minimalist approach with these things.

Try to establish a balance between your cover letter and resume so that neither looks too bulky for the recipient to handle.

If I get a four-page resume, my first thought probably isn't, "Hey, this person has lots of experience." It's, "This is too much to read when I have 75 of them to go through."

 

Shotglass-- I can definitely understand that. One of the reasons why I re-vamped my resume was that it was 2 pages long, and I wanted to condense everything onto one page and present it as well as possible.

When you're reading over cover letters, what catches your eye in particular? What do you look for?

 

Again, balance. This time, I'm talking about being enthusiastic without being nauseating. Just be straightforward and let them know that they'll get a full day's work for a full day's pay.

The first person who uses this post to push their own little agenda about the state of the industry and the economy will officially be an asshole.

Your thought about the one-page resume is well thought out. That is indeed the ideal.

 

fixed.

The first person who copies and pastes this post has too much time on their hands.

 

I have a summary of qualifications at the top, a list of jobs, education and at the bottom, a list of computer skills.

 

I went to a skills based resume in my last job search and it seemed to work well for me. Basically, spend most of your resume writing about what you can do instead of breaking them up into different areas. Make it easier for the editor to find your qualifications and skills. One-stop shopping, as it were. Editors don't care where you got your experience with CS3, only that you have it. Where you worked, really, is a footnote. If you worked for a paper with a great rep, play that up in the cover letter. My two cents.

 

I'm constantly tweaking, especially now that it doesn't seem like focusing on newspapers in my job search is a wise decision. That means I'm looking at how to approach my resume and cover letter for the other options out there.

I've tried changing the resume to fit the job, and I've tried coming up with a catch-all resume that lets me change the cover letter as needed. I'm also having trouble finding that balance shotglass mentioned, mostly because with 25 years of newspaper experience, it's getting harder to get it all to fit on one page without going to too small a font.

Are any of my concerns worth refreshing this discussion? Are others running into some of the same issues?

 

I recently trimmed mine down to one page print experience, one page broadcast (which I don't necessarily need to send) and a cover letter.

 

I wouldn't worry too much about the one-page "requirement," J_D. Just be as concise as possible, but in this day and age, a lot of people in our line of work tend to build up varied experience. If you've done a lot, and it's important enough to list, then go for it.

I don't think a two-page resume is nearly as big a red flag as those old resume etiquette books might tell you it is.