Summer Media Internship

This article from ABC is germane to the “Applying for Jobs” discussion.

http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=11331798

Writing the Perfect Resume
Avoid the Mistake of Sharing Too Much Personal Information

COLUMN
By MICHELLE GOODMAN
Aug. 10, 2010 —

A recruiter pal was recently grumbling about a resume she’d received: “I don’t need to know that the candidate has a pet Schnauzer named Miss Sparkles,” my chum said. “Unless she’s applying for a job at the Humane Society, it’s irrelevant.”

This isn’t an isolated incident. In the past week, I’ve collected countless tales from recruiters, hiring managers and resume consultants about North American job seekers who include far too much personal information on their C.V., from their age, height, religion, wedding anniversary and number of years sober to the fact that they enjoy sleeping, goofing off on Facebook and chasing UFOs in their spare time.

“When they say recruiters look at a resume for 10 seconds, that’s true,” said Kristen Fife, a recruiter in Seattle who wades through hundreds of resumes a week. “If you’re looking to hire somebody to do something, you don’t really care that their favorite color is green or that they like to go to monster truck rallies on the weekends. And yes, that was on a resume I saw today.”

Mentioning your favorite color or your pet’s name on a resume may sound harmless enough — after all, companies want to hire people, not automatons. But oversharing on your C.V. can wind up biting you on the backside. To a rushed recruiter or hurried hiring manager, a resume riddled with TMI is not only wildly impertinent, it’s a glaring red flag.

“Job seekers get all kinds of advice to be different and stand out, and for some people, that means adding information that they think will make them unforgettable,” said career coach Debra Yergen, author of “Creating Job Security Resource Guide”. “They will be unforgettable, but for all the wrong reasons.”

So herewith, the most common resume overshares — and why you should avoid making the same mistakes:

The Family Guy or Gal

Your resume is not a cocktail party. Thus, those you send it to do not need — or want — to know the names, ages, birthdates and special talents of your children. Nor do they want to read a detailed description of your loving marriage and zest for family life. They just want to know what you can do for their company and what employment experience you have to prove it.

You may be the proud father of three red-headed triplets who all made the honor roll this year. But unless you’re applying for a job with the National Honor Society, save such family chit-chat for the job interview.

The Underachiever

No doubt your parents were proud of your childhood awards and extracurricular activities. It is, however, time to move on. At best, employers might find accomplishments like making Eagle Scout or setting a record for the most Girl Scout cookies sold in your troop an odd addition to your resume. At worst, they might think you have some growing up to do.

Not every hobby or interest you’ve entertained since reaching adulthood warrants a resume mention either. Your fraternity brothers may have been impressed by your ability to sleep for 18 hours straight or ingest 17 hotdogs in one sitting, but most managers won’t be. Unless you’re applying for a job in a creative or offbeat field, save the extra dash of personality for the job interview (though you still may not want to mention your love of naps or beer bongs).

The Celebrity Worshipper

Facebook might make a fine place to post that prized photo of your chance meeting with your favorite actor or musician. Your resume, on the other hand, does not. Brian Sekandi, a partner with Toronto-based recruiting firm Gilmore Partners, recently encountered a candidate who had yet to learn this distinction: “One of her most recent accomplishments was meeting and hanging out with [rapper] 50 Cent,” Sekandi said. “She included a picture of herself with 50 Cent in her resume body right before her experience.”

Fortunately for the applicant, Sekandi was kind enough to encourage her to resubmit her C.V. without the celebrity worship.

The Bitter Ex

“I’ve seen resumes list the reason that a person left each position, job after job after job,” said Ira Bershad, managing partner at Dallas-based recruiting firm Kaye/Bassman International. “That should never go on a resume. You have to allow that to come up in conversation during the interview.” And even then, he said, your answers should be short, sweet and incredibly diplomatic.

In other words, save the snarky comments you’re dying to make about your former manager’s limited interpersonal skills for your conversations with friends and family. No one wants to hire a bitter ex-employee.

The Census Form

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission laws are designed to protect you against discrimination based on your age, race, religion, sex, physical appearance and so on. So unless you’re applying for a job with, say, AARP or the ACLU, better to leave off such identifying details. They’ll only strike recruiters — who do their darndest to comply with federal anti-discrimination regulations — as odd, perhaps even concerning. The more paranoid among them may even worry about a possible discrimination lawsuit, if, knowing your age or ethnicity, they call you for a phone screen and then don’t call you in for a face-to-face interview.

The Match.com Ad

Although a resume is a come-on of sorts, it’s no place for scented paper, e-mail handles like sexykitty, the intimate details of your bedroom fetishes or sexy photos of yourself — unless perhaps you’re applying for a job in the adult entertainment industry. Yet C.V. consultants and career coaches see a surprising number of resumes that make this fatal error.

Career coach Adriana Llames, author of “CAREERSudoku: 9 Ways to Win the Job Search Game”, was recently put off by a resume she received that featured some unconventional graphics at the top of the page: a picture of a woman’s bare leg in a stiletto, alongside the words “This is what will get me in the door.”

“To be honest,” Llames said, I only read the summary and didn’t bother with the rest. That’s what happens when someone has TMI.” Although the candidate had more than 15 years of sales experience, Llames noted, “she also had poor professionalism, so her skills were irrelevant.”

The Autobiography

Resumes that wax poetic about the candidate’s personal life usually come off as the inappropriate ramblings of someone with no social filters or sense of professional etiquette. Unfortunately, they’re far too common. Las Vegas based career coach and trainer Alexia Vernon recently received a resume from a job seeker that was 25 percent work history, 75 percent autobiography.
“He not only listed such things as the year of his birth, marriage, divorce and dates his children were born, he also put in several lengthy descriptions about his family crises to explain gaps in employment,” Vernon said. “His resume was five pages. He had three actual paying jobs and the rest was personal history.”

Moral of the story: save your literary aspirations for your novel or memoir, and your personal crises for the therapist’s couch. If the employment gatekeepers and consultants of the world want to read a juicy tale, they’ll go the bookstore.

Copyright © 2010 ABC News Internet Ventures

After reading this article I realize that internships can be a complicated thing and somtimes, abusive. There is no doubt that certain companies will take advantage of a student and their “internship” privalages and either ask them to work more hours or partake in less relevant job duties, like sweeping the bathroom florr. I think there needs to be some regulation, for sure, regarding how many hours an intern is allowed to work for a company and what their job description is really going to be. To a degree, you can only control so many aspects, but I do feel that it’s incredibly wise for colleges to regulate what student works with what company. This is a really smart way to keep track of who is working for who and if it sounds legitiment or not. I think that one of the most concerning matters surrounding “unpaid interns is they are often not considered employees and therefore are not protected by employment discrimination laws.” I think that this is something that really needs to be looked into and fixed because it is simply unacceptable..

While this article is meant to touch base on what is ethical and what is not, we need to consider what is legal. People in this country have the right to write as they wish (for the most part..) and ethics only seem to apply when one cares about how they portray the people in their stories, or the type of reputation they maintain.

I honestly think that Kilgannon was being honest, genuine and respectful. Ramirez was the one who bashed a hole into the door to unlock it, clearly, Kilgannon was being given permission by Jones’ room-mate, Ramirez, to glimpse into his living space.

“But then friends and family began weighing in, saying that Kilgannon had painted a false picture of Jones as a recluse and had invaded his privacy by entering his bedroom and taking pictures without the family’s permission.”

It should be commonly understood that the life of a celebrity rarely stays private. Celebrities depend on their fans for their fame and success and their fans rely on their celebrities to tell them all about their life. While it may seem a bit ridiculous and while I do think that everyone is entitled to their privacy, celebrities are always in the public eye and people feel not only compelled to know about their lives but they feel like they [deserve] to know. Kind of like people felt they deserved to know whether or not Bill Clinton had slept with another woman, or whether or not the doctor was giving Michael Jackson an excess amount of drugs to keep him calm/help him sleep. When one enters a road to fame, it would be naive to think that their life would remain only their own; It’s a given that they will always be chased down, photographed and sought after. This is not to say that this is the way things should be, but it’s how they are.

“In the end, the blog post raised some big questions about reporting standards and ethics: Did Kilgannon cross that sometimes hard-to-define line between legitimate reporting and violating privacy? Did he put too much trust in a single source? Does The Times have lesser standards for online journalism than for print journalism? Did a journalistic device — what Kilgannon’s editor called a “snapshot” of one famous life — turn out to be misleading and unfair? How much can The Times satisfy our curiosity about a great artist before it is less like The Times and more like a gossip sheet?”

Now referring to the text above- While all of this raises a good question, it needs to be understood that information will vary per point of view. Everyone defines and witnesses reality differently, therefore everything is almost always subjective. However people [chose] to percieve Hank Jones after reading the article and seeing the pictures of his apartment, this is just one angle of a multifaceted man. It’s obvious that Hank Jones was not just a musician and that he did not just crack jokes all day (as one man explained him to be quite the happy man and not a recluse). People are like onions, and even though this was said by Shrek, it’s true. I think that too often people get caught up in silly, technical details. This is just one angle of a man’s life, not his entire biography.

I think that Kilgannon is pretty innocent in this matter.
Just as stated by Jamieson towards the end of this article, this is just a snapshot of one particular fagment of one man’s life, not the entire album.

The article definitely resonates with my experiences in applying for jobs. Using job search resources and advice, I usually end up sending out a well thought up cover letter which shows off my skills in sucking up . The letter is usually “dry”–severely lacking in personality, because that’s what “they” tell you to do. Tell the company they’re great, tell them why you’re great, and tell them to consider paying you for you greatness. I hate sending out resumes and cover letters just because they come off so dull. I would like to show my personality, but I sometimes fear that it would have an adverse affect; if I show my personality, they won’t take me seriously.

For me, interviews are usually much better than sending a resume. I think I stand out in interviews because I am bubbly, honest, and outgoing, far more than what you can tell from any cover letter I’d write.

I find the best thing to do when going in for a job interview is to forget everything you learned in school. I often remind myself that they are being interviewed as much as I am. Because my objective is to get a job that suits my skills and ambitions, because I am a valuable asset to their business, and for that reason I know already that they want to take me on. Ok you might be thinking this is like standing in front of a mirror syking yourself up, however it is not. It is about creating an even ground. Sure you should be well versed and qualified for the job, but you should also be funny, smart, unpredictable, passionate, and different.. un-replicable. You should always have a good hand shake. Probably the most uninteresting thing to happen to an interviewer is that they get all the “right” answers. Those answers are wrong people. Say what you mean and know what to say catered to the real world, real money, and real business. Now I can’t say I have what I would call a “real” job yet, but I just like lots of you am on my way out and these tacts have served me well in the past, so Ill stick to my real world knowledge and hope for the best. Actually Im a little bit bummed that I don’t play the violin and Im only a quarter the way proficient in another language. The competitins steep and climbing.

This article sets up a great view on the employers part of hiring workers and shows how long and difficult this process can be.  What I was grasping from the article and what seemed to be portrayed was that employers seek for creative answers, not the typical responses that many candidates use because they are afraid to say what they really think or they are so used to giving a simple response because that is what they are used to.

The hiring process is not easy for either the employer or the applicant because as an employer they are seeking for someone who stands out with not only their responses but also through their resume, cover letter, recommendations etc. As for the applicant, they want to give the best answers but do not want to really say anything that could possibly hurt their chances of getting the position at hand.  It is a tough process for both but the more indepth questions and responses that are given, the more each party gets to know about the other and what is expected on either end.

I am extremely pleased to hear that the Labor Department is cracking down on companies who are not paying their interns when the intern is doing anything and everything to keep a good name and a possible job when the internship is over.  You cannot blame a student/intern who is seeking for a job right after college to do whatever their superiors at the internship are asking of them.  The thing is that it is not fair or legal, for that matter, for employers to take advantage of their interns and make them do the run arounds/errands of the office.  As stated in the article, one unpaid intern was assigned to work in animation for their internship but instead was given the task to clean the door handles of all the offices to prevent swine flu; this is unfair and there is no gain of work experience under these conditions.

Many interns are looking to get a full work experience in their field of study and wanting to put their name out there to get their foot in the door.  The employers who hire these interns should know what it is like to just get started and what it is like to learn the ropes.  It is not fair that some companies take advantage of the interns who are willing to do whatever their bosses want because they do not want to step on any toes when it comes to finding a career based job or a possible job after the internship is up.

Hopefully the crack down keeps going and more unpaid interns get their voices heard if they are treated unfairly and not getting the work experience promised to them when they were hired.

This article really expressed what can go wrong in the using of blogs for news articles.  I feel that Kilgannon was seeking for a new angle to the jazz musician’s, Hank Jones, life which I believe was a great lead to an interesting story.  It is not easy to get a hold of someone who is willing to open the apartment of a music legend who has just past because where one lives tells a lot about their life behind the scenes.  I am not saying that Kilgannon was right in just getting in touch with just the landlord of Jones’ apartment; but as a Times reporter he should have known to get in touch with the family of the deceased before invading the apartment of a man who was very private and kept to himself; it would have shown more respect to the family.  I am sure that the family would have let Kilgannon in with an accompaniment of a family member and him giving more information on what angle he was looking to take the blog story at.

I feel that this blog was taken more to heart because it was written by a New York Times reporter, a well-known paper that has a great name set out there for them.  I wonder if this blog posted by Kilgannon would have been just a gossip column or written by someone from a smaller newspaper or magazine if the family would have felt the same way about it?  Does the standard of the paper leave readers expecting higher standards for all that the papers name contributes to?

It can be very difficult in figuring out what “lines” are being crossed when reporting on certain stories for a blog or even for a printed article, especially ones on celebrities and heartbreaking news.  In this case more background research on getting in touch with the deceased musician’s family should have been done but overall the blog did not seem like it was detrimental to the music legends life.  These “lines” are difficult to claim but news is news and sometimes getting to the truth can mean digging a little deeper than what most people are used to doing.

As I was reading the article I was thinking about how I am not getting paid to work a full day and keep up with the work I am assigned each day.  I do not mind the work load and the experience that I am getting at my internship but I do not think it is fair when everyone else around me is getting paid and I am helping them along the way with the work that needs to get done.  I feel that the interns should get a stipend of some sort, it does not have to be a large sum of money but something to show the appreciation of the work that is getting done would be a nice gesture.  I understand it is a tough time for the economy and many people are taking this time to build their resumes but one cannot really get by without getting paid some sort of money.  I hope that more companies realize the work that many interns do and give them some type of stipend along with college credit, if accountable.

Ok, I can only give my personal experience.

First, I think it’s a ridiculous challenge for candidates to meet these hidden and subconscious goals while under pressure.  That said, I totally understand an employer wanting to weed through potentials, and I can’t find any argument for why they shouldn’t be picky, however they choose to do so, when hiring new people (save it doesn’t violate discrimination laws).

Still though, the idea of being ‘fully prepared’ for an interview and application like the one described in the paper is a tall feat indeed.  That’s just someone who happened to be at their best that day, because there’s virtually no way any one person could be so ready all the time.  If that were true, they’d have better jobs that this one.

But what’s fair is fair, and if that is what the employer is looking for, it’s their choice, flat out.  What I don’t like is the ‘who you know’ situation.  Again, it’s not that I can point out that it’s wrong, I just think its a load of crap (excuse my language).  Unless you’re applying for a job as a human resource networker, who you know shouldn’t matter to bits.  At least, that’s from someone who can’t play that game well, I’m sure if you’re on the other side it’s just fine.

But in the end, as above, as long as it doesn’t violate discriminatory laws, it’s the employers choice to use whatever means they like to find people to hire.

I almost always get jobs based on timing.  That’s just how it is.  I’m not “on” at every interview, and I know beforehand when it’s going to be rough.  I almost always land the jobs where I happen to be at the right place at the right time.  I’m sure it’ll continue that way indefinitely, and I prefer it.

It gives me the chance to put forward the only thing I know is true and steady: myself.  I’m not perfect everyday, and when I present a true form of who I am regularly, not the ‘interview’ me, I increase my chances of speaking frankly and reasonably with my potential employers.  I almost always land those jobs. I find that people want real people, and real people aren’t perfect.  When people see you’re being yourself, they are attracted to it, not to mention that I’m almost always confidently relaxed in that scenario as well.

Sometimes, of course, I totally bomb it.  That’s how it is, I guess I’m not supposed to have that job then.  The best advice here, be true to yourself, and don’t take the decision so personally, either good or bad.

Good luck.