On November 21,2016, I attended an in house event presented by the people at Creative Circle: Jocelyn Yant and Lauren Scottow. What I love about this event is that it gave us an insight on how we should prepare our resume, cover letter, and portfolio when we’re entering the work field.
Let’s start off with the resume. They mention that average job recruiter/hiring manger will only look at people resume for about 5-7 seconds before moving to the next. Something it can be less than that. So the important thing to do is to make our resume look very visual appealing. This way it can keep the recruiter to look at it longer. Keep it simple and clean, but at the same time informative. They mention that we should never put a pictures onto our resume especially a self-portrait. The reason is that we don’t want them to start discriminating or judging you because of that photo. It’s best that it should stay hidden on how we look until the interview stage. We must always carry at least 3-4 copies of our resume when going to an interview. Never go into an interview room empty handed.
Portfolio is what we use to showcase the work we have done. It was mention that a digital portfolio is a must because it’s much easy to access to when were doing an interview. Since we’re in a digital world, it’s best that our portfolio is in a digital format. However, we can still do print. They mention how print can still be helpful in an interview. Not all interviewer will have access to a laptop. In this case, the printed portfolio is a big help. Same as the resume, always carry extra with us.
On a normal day, I’m not very good with writing a cover letter. The reason is that I’m not sure what to write on it as well as how long should it be. I was never familiar with the structure of a cover letter. Seeing them going over cover letter, it was a big help for me. They mention that we should never attached our cover letter in a word document or PDF into the email. So instead they recommend that the email body will be the space for us to write the letter.
So at the end, I was glad that I made my way to this event. It was a big help for me in the future when preparing my resume, cover letter, and portfolio.
