Month: August 2012

“What I did on my summer vacation….”

by Jamie Grant, C ’98, GEd ’99

If your grade- and high-school teachers were anything like mine, you might have had to give a little “report” at the start of the school year with the title, “What I did on my summer vacation.”  This was always a nice way to learn about classmates’ adventures, but I’m sure forced many of us to struggle and think back over the loooong months of summer, trying to remember all that we had done and experienced.

I encourage you, should you be a returning undergraduate or graduate student, to go through the same exercise today – for the benefit of your resume.  Think back over the last three months, on all you have done, learned, achieved, or experienced.  Think of your outcomes and learning at your internship, or the adventures (and foreign language practice!) you had while traveling.  Consider the progress of your research project(s), or what you learned in the courses that you added to your transcript (or took for fun!)  If you volunteered, try to articulate the value you were able to bring to your organization and the positive connections you were able to develop with the people with whom you spent your time. 

Perhaps your summer months held a different kind of experience than I’ve mentioned, but regardless, do your best to consider how that might resonate with your career plans, and include it on your resume!  I know I personally am looking forward to reviewing many resumes in the coming weeks and learning about all the wonderful ways Penn students spent their summers!

Connecting the Dots: The Impact of a Resume Profile

By Sharon Fleshman

Have you ever applied for a position and wondered how to help the employer see the relevance of your experiences?  Perhaps you are seeking a career change and your recent experience seems unrelated.  Maybe you have an eclectic background with no obvious career focus.    A resume profile, sometimes called a summary of qualifications or highlights section, can allow you to note themes in your career path or key skills that a recruiter might not otherwise notice.   An effective profile is one that is not generic but tailored to a given career or position.  Consider the following examples:

“Over 10 years of progressive and diversified analytical and education-related experience in the public and private sector. Strong background in law, government and policy, including quantitative data management skills and advocacy experience. Skilled in SAS and SPSS.”

With this profile, a student sought to make a switch from law to education policy.  Note how the student emphasized a track record in analytical work (law and policy research) and experience relevant to the field of education (education law and volunteer work with high school students). The student also made note of skills in statistical software, which are vital in the field of policy research.

 “International experience with students from diverse cultures, through teaching, living, and traveling abroad.  Familiar with college admissions practices through work as an undergraduate liaison. Strong counseling skills with adolescents.”

This profile was for a student who wanted to move into an advising position in international programs and services at a university.  In addition to performing administrative tasks at an international programs office and interning as a counselor while in graduate school, the student had a variety of previous work experiences including teaching overseas, working in an admissions office and helping with education research.

To see how profiles typically look on resumes, take a look at the following samples:

 

Olympics and Career Exploration

While watching the Olympics, my sister asked me: “Do you sometimes wonder if maybe there’s another sport you’d play well if you knew about it?  Like trampoline? or judo?”  Or we might like biathlons if we had grown up where there are snow and guns. It could turn out then that she had good hand-eye coordination all along.

I think that people pursue careers in much the same way. We generally go into careers we have heard about and know someone in, and we choose a career that we have a little experience in to know that we’d be good at it. So, for those of you who are trying to figure out what your calling is, don’t just sit back and debate the options. Go out and experience new things, take a class in something you know nothing about, talk to people in different jobs, volunteer or do an internship, and fact check. My point isn’t to find some obscure career that you have to move far away to do, but that there are a lot of careers out there that you might like a lot and be very good at, so why limit yourself to the careers you’ve heard about but not so sure you want?

Online Dating: Jobs Edition

LinkedIn website traffic volume is booming –  employers and job seekers are proactively using the site as an effective tool to connect.   There are also many articles on current recruiting practices and social media.  As the LinkedIn community becomes more central to hiring for many companies, I have become interested in the fact that most people now are including a photo, a component of what LinkedIn considers to be “completing” your online profile.

In the USA, the convention of attaching your photo with your resume faded away in the late1970s with the civil rights movement and the establishment of ideas of equal opportunity in hiring.  Are we taking a step back as we embrace the future with social media job searches?

Few people want a potential employer to pursue them – or disregard them – because of the way they look.  Yet, unconscious or even overt inclinations can influence hiring practices. To be very objective in finding the best candidates, hiring managers likely will be combating well documented proclivites towards hiring people who look like them, preconceptions about ethnicity and gender, biases about people who they find attractive or ugly, as well as stereotypes related to age or visible disabilities.   You can read more about hiring biases and discrimination online – in essence, studies indicate that people are prone to making quick judgments, having nothing to do with a candidate’s skills and accomplishments.

The question is, how would you feel knowing that someone might not look further into your LinkedIn profile if you don’t have an appealing picture?  Do you think that your picture reflects well on you and improves your chance of getting hired?  Obviously, even in the past when photos were not readily available, as soon as a candidate showed up for the interview, a hiring manager’s biases regarding the person’s appearance could come into play.  But at this point in the hiring process, the job seeker has already impressed the employer with their resume of accomplishments, or their well written cover letter.  They have the chance to verbally counter some of the biases based on their looks.

I will continue to look for more information or articles on how hiring practices and biases may be affected now that it is so easy to find a picture of someone online. While I think this newish trend (or retrotrend?) of incorporating photos in professional profiles is not going to change, I do believe that employers can be vigilant in training recruiters to address their biases, and to acknowledge the benefits of diversity in hiring.  Here is an example of guidelines developed in the Human Resources industry, which addresses this issue: http://www.shrm.org/TemplatesTools/hrqa/diversity/Pages/default.aspx .

For you the candidate?  In addition to being thoughtful of the image you put forward via social media, there are also suggestions for breaking through biases during your interviews: http://www.culturosity.com/articles/interviewbias.htm.