I have only been at work for three months, but already they have me on a search committee. When we were meeting to talk about interview questions before human resources gave us the application packets, I took advantage of the opportunity of working with a new group of people to take a quick poll about a pet peeve of mine that I have referenced before– the resume objective statement.
Like me the other people on the committee found it really unhelpful, thought it often felt stilted and unnatural on an already heavily formalized document, were uninteresting, unhelpful to the process and took up too much room on a document that was supposed to be limited to one page.
And this was from people in a cross section of areas from graphic design, finance, athletics and accounting.
I have come to the conclusion that all those guides that tell you to include objective statements on your resume are doing so at the behest of big corporations who use software to screen applicants based on key phrases in the resume. I suspect there are a lot of employers that don’t find the format really enhances their impression of applicants.
In the arts, a little divergence from the standard suggested format can definitely be an asset.
A long time friend recently asked me to look at his resume and it occurred to me that like so many things that involve selling a product, service or idea, it is the story you tell about yourself that really matters.
Because what you will emphasize differs from employer to employer, I generally provide that narrative in my cover letter and leave my resume to provide the supporting details. Often those details need to be tweaked a bit, but the big variation in applications is in the cover letter based on the job requirements and information about the organization my research has turned up.
Still it is important that your resume be able to tell your story on a stand alone basis. A person should get an idea about what things ignite your passion while they determine how accomplished and suitable you are for the position based on your work history.
What sort of frustrates me as a person working in the arts is that the process I often need to follow suppresses the usefulness of 95% of the expressive tools available these days. You often have the option of submitting materials by email now, but the distribution to search and audition committees is generally by printed hard copies which eliminates the usefulness of links to videos and other materials.
From my own recent searches, I know that committee members will definitely check out blogs and webpages. I would see a surge in visits on Google Analytics and have a sense that I would get a call days, and sometimes weeks, before it was made. It is more difficult for a committee member to accurately type in the URL for a YouTube video.
Sure you can set up a webpage with appropriate links and direct people there. But it is much more organic to be able to cite a project and immediately provide a link to it.
It is also difficult to set up a custom website with an easy to enter URL for every job application you send out. You don’t want to apply to a Children’s Theatre and send them to a site that includes so many links to other types of projects that the employer gets the impression your passion really lies elsewhere.
I am vaguely aware that visual arts organizations make more direct use of digital portfolio review in hiring. I wondered if anyone in the performing arts was conducting their searches in a way that really took advantage of all the available technological opportunities.
Likewise, I wondered if anyone that had recently applied for a job had managed to leverage technology to their benefit as part of their initial application.
One option that just occurred to me would be to create a personal URL for each job search so that each employer only saw the materials you wanted them to see.
You mention the narrative of the cover letter. What do you really want to learn in that short narrative to be highly effective?
Michael-
What I want to see in the cover letter is that the person has read the job description and has a vision for the way they can fit into the organization. What is often a hook is when the applicant has either done something in their career that makes me want to know more, or they draw a connection with the job I never considered.
Of course, as an applicant you may not really know what the most effective hook for me will be. There are a lot of people who don’t draw that connection between their experience and the job description.
Speaking for myself, I often prefer to interview people who have misunderstood the job description slightly but have illustrated their connection than to interview someone who hasn’t made the case for why their background is suitable.
When I wrote about keeping the narrative to the cover letter I was thinking more along the lines of limiting the resume to short, action statements versus something like “programmed a highly successful outdoor festival featuring acts such as Pink Martini, Ani DiFranco which attracted 10,000 people annually. Responsibilities included hospitality, sanitation, vendor organization…”
Going on in that vein for 10 years of experience at 3 different jobs, the resume starts hitting 4 pages pretty quickly.
You can reference that sort of thing in the cover letter describing the arc of your career. But like the elevator pitch, you have to be brief in making your case there too.
A lot of positions out there are garnering 70-100 applicants easily. Reviewing multiple page resumes and cover letters get tiring pretty quickly.
My experience on search committees has been that the initial reading of the cover letter and resume get you into consideration and then people go back and reference your resume when they want to refresh their memory about your experience. (Is he the guy that….?”
You don’t want the length or format of your resume to inhibit their search for information.
Vimeo! I highly recommend it. Or Bit.ly to make your URLs more manageable.
My last four applications all elicited favorable responses, and half of those were for ‘reach’ positions I knew I wouldn’t get, so I must be doing something right. I think the point of the cover letter is to pique curiosity, to get them to read the resume. And the point of the the resume is to get them to call for an interview. My cover letter is a narrative, and it’s fairly bold. It’s strong, but not obnoxious. Some people may decide they don’t care for me, but it seems to make people sit up and want to read the resume.
My resume is two pages, no more, with the bulk of it being jobs of the last 20 years. Since artists often have several jobs, I can pick the ones that are most relevant for that particular search. Each job has bullet points beneath that describe what I did in the position. These are tightly edited and not sentences. This makes it very clean and easy to read (and attack with a highlighter). I edit my stock bullet points to include the verbs from the job description. Consider: a committee took the time to choose those words to best represent what they want. So I make sure to use their words somewhere in all those bullet points, words like ‘organize’, ‘develop’, ‘lead’ and ‘collaborate’.
And right before I hit ‘send’ on the application, I tweak my LinkedIn profile to jive with my resume. I’m sure a conflict between the two has sunk more than one potential candidate!
On my most recent application (which was successful–I start next week!) I used Vimeo. They hadn’t asked for video, but I wanted to put my application over the top. It took a bit of time to set up, but I was able to lock down the permissions more easily than YouTube. I posted three videos of a rehearsal, plus commentary explaining what they’d see in the video. I included the private link in the email when I sent in my application materials. I was able to track views, so I know they viewed them. Apparently they were looking for an director who makes mistakes yet keeps her humor 😉
Hope this helps someone!
Thanks Karen. Those are the type of ideas I was looking for.