How To Spice Up Your Journalism Resume While You’re Job Hunting

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Do you need help to spice up your journalism resume? For college students, like yourself, there are multiple ways to build your resume up. For example, you can emphasize your success, use proper and creative word-choice, and other ways to reel in job interviews with companies. Here are a few ideas to help you spice up your journalism resume.

Emphasis

College students, like yourself, need to emphasize your success. Your resume should not explain why you would be a good candidate for the job. Explain to the job recruiters’ why you are the perfect candidate at your job interview, not on your journalism resume. Job recruiters will be reading your journalism resume too see what you are good at and what experiences you had whether it is from a previous job or an internship. You also need to summarize your experiences and job descriptions by using words that will pique the recruiter’s interest, but make sure your writing looks good and sounds good before you send it in.

While you are looking over your journalism resume, you should remove certain job descriptions that do not pertain to your experiences or your professional strengths. Instead, you should use this space to summarize your greatest achievements in your previous positions and list any of the skills that will help you qualify for the writing position. You should also use words that fit your strengths while drawing the recruiter’s attention with your word-choice.

Wordiness

For you to spice up your journalism resume, use words that fit your strengths by summarizing what you are good at in the resume. You need to describe what you did in your previous jobs that are similar to the one you will be applying for, but you should use words that will pique a job recruiter’s attention. For instance, if you are a journalist, you would use words like “compose,” “interview,” or “edit and proofread” to draw a magazine, newspaper or a News Director’s interest to your resume and portfolio. You should also insure that your font size and style meets the company’s requirements.

Font Style and Size

People will, or will not, recruit you. You need to read over your journalism resume to see if it is worth their time pursuing you for the job based on your font size and style. Recruiters’ accept a uniform font size no smaller than 11 points in size (or no lower than 9-10 points depending on the font style). A recruiter accepts preferred font styles like Georgia, Arial, Bell MT, Garamond, Calibri, Tahoma, and Times New Roman. Sans serif font also works because it is easy for job recruiters to read whether it is on a screen or it is mailed as a hard-copy. Georgia font is preferred if your resume is going to be sent via email and will be read on an online screen.

For you to spice up your journalism resume, you need to make your name stand out by making the font bigger than the rest of the font on your resume. Underneath your name, use a separate line to share your personal information (cell phone and email address). For your journalism resume, use a line spacing of around 20% more, or less, depending on your font size. This will give your resume a clean form and when you are finished looking over the font, you should make sure you do not have any spelling or grammar errors on your resume.

Grammar/Spelling check

Journalism resumes are your chance to make a first impression with a news company, without being there in person, so a simple spell-check is not good enough. You get one chance with a resume, so it has to be perfect. If your resume is full of errors, your chance to get in the news company is gone. Employers will stop reading a person’s journalism resume if they see an error, because they assume that you do not pay any attention to detail.

A spell-checker will identify the basic errors, but it does not know the difference between ‘their’ and ‘there’. A simple spell-check also will not pick up on accidental or incorrect plurals or misspelled words that are also words. If you are having spelling and grammar problems, go to Grammarly. Grammarly is a service that offers free trials to fix your spelling and grammar errors, so there is no reason for you not to take advantage of this service.

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Number count

Using numbers frequently in your journalism resume helps you demonstrate your past accomplishments to your potential employers. On multiple resumes, job applicants, like yourself, are interested in telling potential employers about the achievements that were accomplished with previous employers. For example, an applicant might identify that they have written multiple articles that are maintained on a news database.

Stand Out (in a good way)

Although this might not make any sense, you should consider including your personal hobbies to spice up your resume. You need to remember that you are trying to stand out from the other 100-or-so job applicants applying for the job. Try and stand out on your resume, without sacrificing your professional presence, means that you can increase your chances of getting a job interview with a company you want. You should also tailor your resume to fit the needs of the business you are applying for.

Tailoring a resume

Tailoring your journalism resume is one of the multiple ways to spice it up, which offers you the results you will want. If you have been sending the same resume off to different companies, so do not be surprised when you do not get the results you want. Non-tailored resumes are just basic journalism resumes and these basic resumes will not get you the job you want, but they will help you get entry jobs if you use broad or general terms.

For specific roles in a news company, your journalism resume should reflect the magazine or newspaper that you are wanting to get a job at. Study the news company and look at the style of language they are using and implement their style in your own words. You should also look into the key skills that the news company wants for this position and reference them in your resume (if you have those skills, do not lie on your resume). Each resume you send should be different for specific jobs you are applying for like a Freelance Writer, Investigative Journalist, Court Reporter, Lifestyle Magazine Writer, or a Writer/Photographer at Show Me The Ozarks Magazine.

Do you see yourself using these techniques for your journalism resume? If you like these techniques and they score you an interview, let us know in the comments below.