Tag: resume

Posted on

Five Common Résumé Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

By Erica Freeze

As the school year is coming to an end, it is important for college students to have updated résumés for future careers or internships. As a graduating senior, I constantly find myself updating and changing my résumé to best represent who I am. A résumé can include other elements besides words – different colors and fonts can all help to show who you are to a potential employer. Potential employers make snap judgments about who you are from a simple glance at your résumé. Because of this, it is important that your résumé makes a positive impression on readers. There are certain mistakes that people make time and time again on their résumés that will make an employer turn his or her nose up. Here are some common mistakes and how to avoid them:

1. There is not enough white space. 

You want your resume to appear clean and professional. Overcrowding the page with too much text will most likely overwhelm an employer and cause him or her to not want to read through the whole page. Being precise and to the point on résumés is the best way to go. When an employer receives your résumé, you want them to be able to glace at it and get a general idea of your experience. Additionally, it doesn’t hurt to have a visually appealing layout with some color or a logo you have created to represent who you are. If you’re adept at graphic design, there are general résumé layouts in Microsoft Word and also simple design platforms online such as Canva which have premade templates.

2. You didn’t include results-oriented language. 

As aspiring public relations professionals, we know that results are very important in understanding how to best target key publics. Employers want to see how you drove change at a previous job or internship. They want to know what you have to contribute to their company to drive change. Your résumé should be clear about results you’ve achieved. It can be as simple as “increased Facebook page views by 15%.” If offered an interview, you can elaborate on how you did so, but it is important that on paper you show them that you do include how you contributed to your past job or internship.

3. Your objective statement could use some work.

If you decide to include a statement at the top of your résumé, try to steer away from an objective statement. An example of an objective statement is, “Seeking a role as an account coordinator to advance my career in the public relations industry.” There are a few problems with this statement. It is very bland, and the focus is on what the candidate wants for herself, to advance her career, rather than providing information on how she can generate change for the potential employer. Instead of that, try using a statement that shows your value to a company. An example of this would be, “Transforming communication problems in the entertainment sector into intensive, results-backed solutions. Creating results through identifying stakeholders, building relationships and implementing change.”

4. You didn’t include skills. 

You can list out your skills in a section or provide them interwoven throughout your résumé in your experiences. Employers need to see your skills and how you applied them in previous positions. These skills can help you stand out from other applicants. In a CareerBuilder survey, 35% of employers stated résumés that don’t include a list of skills is one of the most common résumé mistakes that may lead them to automatically dismiss a candidate. If you decide to weave your skills into your resume, start with the skill and then include how you generated positive results because of this skill.

5. You aren’t confident in your past work experiences. 

As a student in the SOJC, I know that classmates can get competitive with each other, and sometimes it feels as though you may not have enough experience or involvement to stand out. Don’t give up, and don’t represent a lack of confidence on your résumé. If you have no PR experience, highlight the skills you acquired in another job and how they can relate to the position you are applying for. For example, if you are a server, you can say something along the lines of “accurately recorded orders and partnered with team members to ensure satisfaction for our customers.” This shows that you have experience working on a team which most likely helped you enhance you r communication skills. Additionally, if you have no work experience, highlighting certain classes on your résumé is okay to do as well – that’s how I got my first internship! Be confident in what you have to offer an employer, even if it isn’t a bunch of work experience in the field you hope to end up in.

The job hunt can be a tricky one, but be confident in what you have to offer employers with an awesome, updated résumé! This is a first impression of who you are and what you have to offer. Use these tips to help you stand out among competitors!

Posted on

Six Steps to a Better LinkedIn Profile

Your LinkedIn profile is like a digital resume, making it an important tool for any budding PR professional. While it might seem intimating at first, LinkedIn isn’t as difficult as you think. The more complete your page is, the more attention it gets. An unfinished profile is unprofessional and unwelcoming, so follow these steps and get set up:

Include a professional photo. This means that you should not be cropped out of any picture, regardless of how good you look in it. Your shoulders should be covered, no cleavage should be showing and the background should be plain. Please avoid any party pictures. If you do not have a professional headshot, grab a friend and a business professional top and take a picture in front of a plain wall.

Use your full name. You want people to be able to find you. Use your compete name, fill in your title and include your last three positions. If you use your Twitter professionally, include a link to it and if you have a professional blog include that link as well.

Claim your custom URL. You can do this by editing your contact information. You want to take out all the numbers at the end of your URL and only have your name.

Write your summary. Do not reiterate everything that you say in your profile. Think of this as your value proposition—who are you, what are your goals and what do you have to offer? Keep your summary short and concise; it should not be longer than a paragraph.

When describing your work experience, use bullets and be precise. Precision is the key theme. Employers think of LinkedIn as more dynamic than a resume so try to paint a picture but in few words as necessary. Your bullets should not be longer than a line. Professor Bill Sherman recommends that your LinkedIn be even more concise than your resume. So, don’t simply copy and paste. If this makes you uncomfortable, you can always use slideshare to share your resume on your profile.

Include relevant volunteer experiences on your profile. This does not mean you should include every volunteer experience that you have had but be sure to include positions were you played a prominent role (regularly over a period of time).  According to a LinkedIn Survey, over 70 percent of hiring managers said they considered volunteer work as legitimate work experience. Volunteering and community service has social capital. The chances that you volunteered for a similar charity, as a potential employer is very high. But do not put volunteer experience on here just to fill your profile; everything on your LinkedIn is fair game for a potential employer to ask in an interview. You do not want to embellish on your profile because it will come back to haunt you later.

Use these tips to complete your LinkedIn profile and stay tuned for future posts to learn about maximizing your LinkedIn experience. If you have any tips that you felt were not covered in this article, please post them below.

Photo Credit: TheSeafarer via Compfight cc

Post by Kaitlyn Chock, PRSSA member and project manager for the 2012-2013 school year. You can contact Kaitlyn at kchock@uoregon.edu.

Posted on

Starting an internship? Make sure to measure.

The secret to a standout resume is to measure your results, and you’ll need to plan ahead to do this. Here are the steps to follow:

1.    Identify the ultimate goal of your efforts. Why are you about to engage in this public relations endeavor? What is the purpose?

2.    Set objectives. Your objectives are how you measure whether you’ve achieved your goal, so each objective must be measurable. To set objectives, you’ll want to find out what your past performance was. You want to do better than last time, but you don’t want to set objectives that are tough to reach. Make sure to set your objectives with your manager.

Ideally, you’ll have access to the organization’s prior performance, so you can report the difference you have made (e.g., increased museum memberships by 5 percent).

If you cannot get information about the organization’s prior performance, you can at least report on your resume whether you met your objectives, and you can potentially report that you exceeded your objectives by a particular percentage (e.g., exceeded attendance objective by 20 percent).

If you will manage your organization’s social media, make sure to use tools to measure your organization’s performance before you take the helm. You can find these tools through an Internet search for “[name of tool] measurement.”

Some of my favorite measurement tools are Edelman’s TweetLevel and BlogLevel, Statigram, and PinPuff. There are plenty of other good tools, as well. Facebook has built-in metrics you can use through Facebook Insights, which you can access as soon as you’re an account administrator. Make sure to record the “before” scores, so you can measure the percentage of improvement at the end of your internship. You might also take some screenshots of the before and after measurements, which would be good visual illustrations for the professional portfolio you’ll prepare during J454.

Another important online tool is bitly, which you can use to measure the number of times people have clicked on a link you share.

3.    Measure your results. To figure out the percentage change between your performance and the prior performance, follow this simple formula:

A. Subtraction: Your performance – prior performance = X
B. Division: X divided by the prior performance

Then move your decimal to the right by two numbers, and you have your percentage change.

If you’re interested in reading more about measurement, subscribe to Katie Paine’s blog, check out one of her books from the library, or do both. Best wishes with your summer internship!

Photo Credit: MarcelGermain via Compfight cc

Guest post by Professor Tiffany Gallicano,  public relations faculty member for the UO School of Journalism and Communication. Visit her blog The PR Post.