Dr. Leggett: Hi, everyone. I'm here today to give you a little bit more guidance on that famous document that you all sweat about at the time that you're facing the internship search. And that is called the resume.
Consider this Dr. Leggett's tips on doing that resume in order to get yourself an internship. Students call me often and present to me their first draft of a resume. We have a conversation.
And at the end, they say, you should find a way to tell everybody this message. So that is why I'm doing this video for you today. It's not going to substitute for me doing a one to one on your particular resume, but, hopefully, it'll give you some things to think about until we have that opportunity.
So number one to think about. What is the purpose of your resume? Many people think that the purpose of a resume is to document everything that you've done in the past. Well, I'm here to challenge that assumption.
For the purpose of getting an internship, your resume has one goal, and that goal is to get someone's attention and, once you've got someone's attention, to get you to the next stage in whatever process you are embarking upon. Number one goal of your resume is get someone's attention.
How much time will a person spend looking at your resume? It's important to know that whoever is reviewing resumes will not take the time to read a lengthy document that tells them everything you've done in your life. They will spend minutes on your resume, not hours, and probably less than five, less than three. It could be as little as one minute on your resume. So your resume needs to be concise, well-organized, and purposeful.
What do I mean by purposeful? Your document should be one that has clear messaging so that someone reading it will know exactly what you mean. No work should be required by the person reading your resume to understand what you're talking about, what kind of company you worked at, what kind of jobs you did, and what you mean by some technical jargon. You want to make it easy for them to read your resume and know exactly what you did but, more importantly, what you want to be doing in the future and what skills you bring to the next opportunity.
Therefore, your resume is more future-based than historical-based. And this I want to say again because it's counterintuitive, right? Your resume, of course, summarizes what you've done in the past. But it's more important to think about who's going to be reading your resume in the future and where do you want to go in the future so that your resume has a marketing purpose.
It's a marketing document more than a historical document. You are marketing yourself. You are a brand. And you are putting yourself out there in a particular way so that whoever reads your resume can understand where you want to go and pick up from what you've done in the past messages that relate to where you want to go in the future.
Let me give you an example of how this might work. Let's say that you're interested in getting an internship in market research or consumer insights. You've got a marketing goal. But in the past, you haven't done marketing or had a job with a marketing title, but you were working the cash register as a salesperson at Trader Joe's.
So let's look at what you might have put on your resume to summarize what your job duties were at Trader Joe's. Maybe you talk about the fact that you worked the cash register, you interacted with customers, you answered questions that they might have, you helped customers find things on the floor of the store, and that you participated in team meetings and learned about products, all of which is true and is factually a list of things that you might have done in your job at Trader Joe's.
But if you're interested in getting a job in market research or in marketing, think about what you've learned in the MAPP program as the language that talks about market research, consumer insights, branding, talking about the customer journey, talking about the customer experience, talking about forming loyal relationships with customers. You've learned a lot in this program about what it takes to be connecting with customers in order to further a brand.
Therefore, I would suggest that you go back through your duties at Trader Joe's and now think about, well, what did I do that actually is kind of endorsing the brand or carrying forth the brand identity with customers? You might, therefore, re-word some things. And instead of saying that you checked out customers' produce at the cash register, you might say something along the lines of interacted with customers to provide excellent customer service to uphold the high brand standards of Trader Joe's. That sounds a little bit different.
You also might say that you participated in training by Trader Joe's management in order to understand the ingredients of creating brand loyalty among customers. You might even list the kind of trainings that you were involved in when you were first working at Trader Joe's.
So in other words, thinking about the fact that you worked at a highly recognizable brand, Trader Joe's, means that other highly recognized brands will respect that you knew how to uphold the brand standards for such a recognizable and great company. And that company does have very loyal customers. Therefore, if you can say in your resume just those key words about customer experience and loyal customers to uphold brand standards, it shows that you're more insightful about your role as a marketer.
And even if you wanted to add in some customer insights, you could say that you engaged in conversation with customers in order to better understand their needs and expectations. Wow, that's what a job as a market researcher is all about, just changing a few words to connect to where you want to go instead of thinking retroactively about where you were. Reflect on what you did in the past, but put a new lens on it to make it easy for someone who wants to hire you in market research or consumer insights to think you have something to offer. They don't have to work very hard if you can give them that language in your resume.
Let's talk about some resume basics because there are many, many ways in which to tackle a resume. But, again, I'm giving you Dr. Leggett's MAPP tips for how to do this resume. And one of the things I want you to know for tips is that the actual layout on the page matters.
Students ask me all the time, can they have red font? Can they have pictures on the side? Can they highly design the resume? My advice to you is no.
Try to be as straightforward as you can using black and white, 12 or 10-point font at the most, and clearly organized what's on the paper for ease of reading by whoever has the pleasure of looking at your resume. Believe it or not, if you have things in columns or you have some of the things over at the side and different sizes and different colors, it's more distracting. And it's not as efficient for someone to read and extract the information that they're looking for from your resume.
So set aside your artistic talents unless, of course, you are submitting a resume to an art kind of position or a creative position. There may be some caveats there where you can do a few more creative things. But generally speaking, straight, linear, organized, black and white resume with 10-point font at the smallest. OK. Got that out of the way.
Secondly, how to organize the material on that page. You want to have white space on that page. A dense page that is filled with words just looks more heavy. And the reader will spend even less time trying to wade through it. So try to create white space on the page.
You do that by making sure that you don't use whole sentences or paragraphs. This is an exercise in brevity, and the best way to be brief is to use bullets to explain what comes under every job entry, bullets and phrases, not sentences and paragraphs.
I've also found that students sometimes are confused about the chronology on the resume. Should education go at the top or the bottom? And should you start with things that are most recent or things that were most far away and go in chronological order?
Again, this is a strategic decision. Your resume is a strategic document marketing yourself. So you have to think, what will put you in the best light? I'm going to recommend that for many of you, especially if you're early in your career, what is going to put you in the best light is USC. You are spending a lot of money to get USC on that resume.
And I've looked at MAPP student resumes where they don't even put USC on there because they haven't finished the program yet. That is absolutely not what you want to do. You want to get as much mileage out of this great university and this great degree as you can.
So for many of you, the first thing at the top of your resume should be University of Southern California, Master of Science and Applied Psychology Program. And over at the right-hand side, you say expected May 2020, May 2021. Whenever you expect to get your degree is what you put there, not the year that you began the degree. No one cares when you started. What they want to know is where are you in the trajectory of that degree and how close are you to being eligible for a new job or how close are you to the end of your program as you're looking for an internship.
What do you say about the USC MS and Applied Psychology degree? Many students' resume that I see put nothing under that, just says that and nothing more and moves on to their undergraduate degree. Well, the Applied Psychology degree here at USC could use some explanation. In fact, it becomes more interesting to employers as they learn more about the program. So why not give them more right up front?
Many students find that it's helpful to list the courses that they've taken. I also recommend that you list any projects that you may have worked on. List them right up there under the degree right up at the top. This gives people who look at you as a student the idea that you've actually done some pretty interesting professional work through the projects that you've engaged in the program.
Some of the kinds of examples of projects that you may have done would be a marketing project that you did in consumer psychology where you had to come up with a complete marketing project. In social media, you may have come up with a social media campaign to market a project. You may have in your research methods class engaged in a client survey and learned how to design it, analyze it, report about it, and even talk to the client about it. Any things that you have done that you can enumerate under the degree to help someone understand what you've done in this program would be advisable.
OK. After you've got USC and the MAPP program out there right in front-- oh, I want to go back to one thing. The Applied Psychology degree has emphasis in consumer psychology and organizational psychology. And if you don't include that, you're missing another opportunity to brand yourself. So please, please, under the MS and Applied Psychology program, take the time to put concentration in organizational psychology, consumer psychology, or list both of them.
And how do you know which order to put them in? Well, if you're applying for a market research position, you might want to put consumer psychology first. If you're applying for an organizational recruiting position, you might want to put organizational psychology first. That's where you have the opportunity to position your resume to give off the messages that will best position you for new opportunities.
OK. So we've talked about USC. Then, yes, under USC comes your undergraduate institution. I'm going to suggest that your GPA from your undergraduate institution is not important to put on your resume at this point in time. No doubt, if you have a great GPA that you're proud of, you probably have another honor too. You may have graduated with honors. You may have been dean's list. You may have graduated magna cum laude or been in some other kind of honor society.
Without listing every one-- again, remember, this is not a historical document, it's a strategic document-- you just want the message to be this person is an accomplished student. Therefore, pick whichever one of those many accolades you have and list the one that's most impressive from your undergraduate education.
You might have done an undergraduate thesis. Definitely put that there, especially if the topic of it is relevant to the MAPP program. If it's completely unrelated and doesn't relate to where you want to go in the future, you might consider leaving your treatise-- excuse me-- your undergraduate honors thesis or whatever you did off of your resume.
I'm often asked about Greek life. Should that go on my resume? Well, generally, if you're a member of a fraternity or a sorority, probably not. But many of you I know have had leadership positions within a sorority or a fraternity. And these may have been substantive.
And many students find that it is important to put those on their resume, either as an entry under your experience. If you were president or vice president and had a marketing role, for example, you would clearly want to call that out and detail the kinds of things that you did in that role. Otherwise, you may want to just list it briefly up under the entry for the university itself.
Same with athletics. If you were on varsity athletics in a D1, D2, or D3 school, list that because, interestingly, athletics is highly valued by the business world. You have learned how to be a team player, and you've learned how to perform under pressure. Merely stating that under your academic credentials for the degree program where you were an athlete also conveys how organized you are in your time management.
For many of you, I also recommend that after your education, you turn to your experience and that you have one category of experience, not dividing it up by professional experience and volunteer experience, unless, of course, you have significant professional experience. But for many of you, lumping all of the kind of things together that you've done is totally appropriate.
You don't have to identify it as having been paid or unpaid. You don't have to identify it even as part-time or full-time. Just put your experience with each entry being substantive. And they should be in chronological order starting with most recent date first. Just like with education, your most recent education starts first with USC.
Experience can include jobs, internships, and volunteer activities all listed together. And, of course, you're going to be selective about what you choose to put there. If you have done more than can be fit on one page, then you need to trim, trim, trim and think about being strategic for the future. Which will get you the most attention and show the most relevance to where you want to go in the future?
So you might leave off that you were a bartender because, nowadays, that's not exactly what you want to repeat in your future. If, however, you were a bartender at a job where it was highly related to functions that are put on for marketing companies, well, you might want to include that because you can tailor that to look like you were involved in marketing events. Strategic thinking about what you put as the job and how you describe the job is Dr. Leggett's main tip to you as you design your resume.
One last word of advice. You have many skills that are not encapsulated in a list of the jobs and the things that you've done in those jobs. At the bottom of your resume-- usually at the bottom of your resume-- I highly recommend that you indicate both technical skills and personal skills, personal skills or personal interests. Technical skills look back at every job you've done and list every software program you've ever used-- I'm not joking-- including point of sale systems that you may have learned at Trader Joe's.
Secondly, I want you to think about who you are as a person when you're not at work. What do you enjoy doing? What are your hobbies? And what soft skills have you evidenced in your career?
This would be where you list that you consider yourself an excellent public speaker, that you are a team player, that you have managed diverse teams, that you are someone who has recently completed a worldwide bicycle tour and visited 20 countries. If there is something that you have done in your personal life that indicates an industry that you're interested in or something unusual as a hobby that will get people at the end of your resume to say, wow, that's cool, I'd like to know more about that, that could be just the thing that gets you attention for that call back.
Be complete in thinking about who you are and use your resume to brand yourself as someone competent, interesting, and worth talking to. That's the goal. Good luck.