Tailoring Your Resume For Marketing and PR Jobs, Part 1

Social media, marketing, and PR jobs at good companies that promise solid upward growth potential are few and far between. In order to position yourself as strongly as possible, your best bet it to tailor your resume so that the hiring managers find you, not exclusively the other way around.

Most resume tips are, by nature, subjective. One hiring manager may see something on your resume and want to call you right away, while unbeknownst to you, that very thing may be what turned off the last person who reviewed your CV.

With that being said, the following are some general rules for resume composition that usually won't steer you wrong.

Codify Your Professional & Internship Experience: Even if you are a brand new graduate with just a few internships and classroom portfolios under your belt, the actual, in-the-field functions you've already learned are the key part of your resume, when a hiring manager reads it.

So what is one of the quickest ways to draw a searcher to the relevant knowledge and experience on your resume? Describe the companies you've worked for. As simple a tactic as pulling a boilerplate line or two from the firm's About Us page lets the resume reader know what kind of firm you worked for. Beyond that, it introduces keywords (like "interactive agency") to your document.

Similarly, using industry-standard position titles such as "Junior Account Executive" or "Marketing Director," even if you worked at a smaller firm with no or unconventional titles, will give the resume viewer an immediate, clear idea of what your level of knowledge and expertise is.

Highlight Tools & Skills: If you know HTML, CSS, Joomla, DART, Photoshop, affiliate networks, standard press release format, media buying, media planning, CRM tools... and certainly if you work with even more specialized tools than these, list them word for word.

You need not group them all into one monolithic block in a "skills" section, either. Instead, you can work them into position descriptions and notes about successes and contributions. Putting these words in bold, or using a similar simple visual technique, will keep the resume reader's eye drawn to your strong points.

Name Names with Brands & Verticals: This one is especially key as you advance beyond the entry level in any marketing- or business-development-related discipline. Your resume should absolutely list your current and past clients.

Not only will the keyword phrase "Estee Lauder" bring your resume up in a search, should a hiring manager need someone with contacts in the fragrance and cosmetics vertical, but listing Estee Lauder, Skinceuticals, Lancome, and Shiseido as clients paints a wholly different pictures tha
"familiarity with cosmetics industry."

Of course, you also want to include the keyword phrases describing your main client verticals (e.g. "fragrance and cosmetics"), as not every hiring manager will search for "Ritz Carlton" at the same time as they are searching "Hospitality and Tourism."