Can I Wear My Nose Ring to the Interview?: A Crash Course in Finding, Landing, and Keeping Your First Real Job (10 page)

Q. Should I mention that I was in a sorority, fraternity, or other social club?

A.
People often assume that Greek societies are all about partying. If your organization was community-service oriented,
take the time to explain its work. If you’re simply proud of your participation in what was a purely social organization, you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of alienating someone by including that information—your interviewer may turn out to be a sorority sister or brother, or may be vehemently opposed to the Greek system.

Q. I was home-schooled in high school. How do I indicate that?

A.
Once you have a college degree, you don’t have to include information about your high school; so there’s no need to mention your home-schooling unless it’s important to you and you want to talk about it in an interview. If you wish to mention it or don’t have a college degree yet, write “High School Diploma” or “GED,” then qualify with “Home-school program followed _____ curriculum,” specifying whatever state or other curriculum was used.

Q. How should I indicate that I transferred from one college to another? And should I? I’m worried that I’ll come off as flaky.

A.
Many college transfers seem to think their choice to switch might make an employer wonder. But in reality, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that you were able to make a change in your life, whatever your motives.

One option is to list the college from which you graduated—or from which you will graduate—first, and then list the college from which you transferred. You will likely be asked about it in an interview, so rehearse a smooth, confident response: “I decided a larger school would make more sense given my academic and extracurricular interests.” If you would rather not talk about the transfer, there’s no need to list the first college.

In explaining the transfer, don’t be too negative—you never know where your interviewer went to school. Choose objective criteria to explain your move: “While I liked Cool College, I found I really needed a bigger/smaller/more urban/rural school so I transferred to Cooler U…”

Q. I never graduated. What do I do?

A.
You may still list the school you attended, along with the extracurriculars and course work you did, but you should indicate the years you attended: 2006–2008. Be prepared to explain matter-of-factly why you never got the degree and whether you have plans to finish it.

Drawing a blank when it comes to the “experience” section of your résumé? This is normal, especially if you’re just starting out in your professional life. I hear it all the time—“But I’ve never done anything.” This is usually untrue. What people often mean is, “I don’t think what I’ve done is meaningful or important,” or they don’t see how the experience they’ve had relates to the job they want.

Think carefully before omitting a seemingly unimportant activity. People typically leave off babysitting, dog-walking, or caring for the sick or elderly, whether these were paid, volunteer, or familial responsibilities. Some career counselors specifically recommend leaving off this kind of experience. I disagree. If you haven’t had a great deal of other work experience, these positions indicate that people were willing to leave their most prized possessions in your care: their children, their dogs, their relatives.

You might be thinking, All I did during school was work at a fast-food restaurant and practice the piano—nothing that relates to a job I might want. Untrue. Working in fast-food restaurants indicates that you can handle pressure and deal with the general public. Practicing any instrument, sport, or hobby reveals commitment and discipline, even—especially—if you do it on your own. It’s all about how you present what you’ve done. If it’s true that in college all you did was take courses, flesh out your résumé by adding a “Course Work” section. Then, in an interview, you say that during college, you decided to focus exclusively on your studies.

For more guidance on describing your experience, see page 51.

Q. I was an intern. Do I list everything I did?

A.
For administrative positions, give a sense of the range of your activities and emphasize the skills most relevant to the position for which you are applying.

Start with items that indicate the greatest responsibility: “Selected to orient new interns. Made travel arrangements for CEO.” At the end of the entry, merge your most mundane duties into a single bullet: “Administrative duties included answering phones, assembling mailings, and filing.” Make sure you list any task specifically mentioned in the description of the job for which you are applying. In an interview or cover letter, you might indicate that you can handle anything that’s thrown at you and won’t balk at the nitty-gritty stuff: “I did everything from setting up the coffee in the morning to revamping the company’s billing process.”

Q. How do I indicate paid versus volunteer experience?

A.
Recent graduates and people returning to the workplace often have a great deal of volunteer experience, which is totally valid—the skills you gained are transferable, so don’t leave something valuable off your résumé just because you weren’t paid for your work.

MARKETING YOUR SKILLS

You do need to differentiate between paid and volunteer positions, however. Depending on how things break down, you can choose to have a section entitled “Volunteer Positions/Internships.” But stratifying your experience this way is not always the best option: If you have done volunteer work that relates directly to a job for which you’re applying, that experience may wind up getting lost in the Volunteer section. In that case, present all of your related work under one heading (“Communications Experience” or “Customer Service Experience,” depending on the job), noting “volunteer” or “unpaid internship” in parentheses beside your titles as needed. A note: If your volunteer work entailed a good amount of responsibility, I think it’s fine to invent a title such as “Intern Coordinator” for yourself (obviously, without going overboard, and also checking with a former supervisor first if possible, especially if you are asking him to serve as a reference).

Q. Do I need to list the location of each job and school on my résumé?

A.
You should list the city and state (and country, if out of the U.S.) once, but don’t repeat it if all your entries are in the same place or if the location is obvious: “University of Chicago.” The location of your jobs should be consistently listed
either after the name of the company or in the right-hand margin. Use standard postal abbreviations for state names if you don’t have the room to spell them out.

Q. Should I feature the name of the place I worked or my title?

A.
You’ll need to make a global decision and be consistent throughout your résumé, but you should choose to feature whatever is more impressive. If you’ve worked or interned for well-known companies, you want to draw attention to that; if you’ve had good titles at lesser-known companies, start with the titles. (See the models on pages 66–73.)

T
HE
“S
KILLS AND
I
NTERESTS
/A
CTIVITIES AND
A
FFILIATIONS
”
section at the bottom of your résumé is not just optional filler. It provides handles—digestible bits of information about your personality—and conversational openers, distinguishing you and rounding you out as a job candidate and potential colleague.

The category itself, along with its content, will differ for each person. How do you spend your time out of the office? Are you a sports enthusiast? Do you volunteer for a not-for-profit organization or charity?

Choose at least four activities, ideally in four domains: one that shows teamwork (perhaps theater or sports), one that shows long-term dedication (you run daily or have studied an instrument for years), one that reveals a cultural interest (you’re a film buff and go to film festivals), and one that illustrates your commitment to volunteerism (tutoring, working in a shelter or soup kitchen, raising money for charity through your sorority or fraternity, and so on).

A
S EVERYWHERE ELSE ON YOUR RÉSUMÉ
, be truthful about your foreign language abilities. Don’t put yourself in the shoes of the candidate who claimed to speak Russian, hoping to impress an interviewer; it turned out the interviewer was fluent and tried to continue the interview in Russian, only to find out that the candidate had exaggerated his proficiency.

Indicate your real level of reading, writing, and speaking. Don’t say you’ve had six years of French if those years were third through ninth grade and you don’t remember it anymore. The employer wants to know what you can do in that language. Can you continue the interview in the language? Make a phone call? Write letters, faxes, and e-mails? Read a novel? Here are the keywords you can use to indicate your language level:

Beginning: Beginning/Rudimentary/Basic/Tourist Spanish

Comfortable but rusty: Conversational/Fluent Conversational/Basic Written Spanish

Advanced: Fluent Reading, Writing, and Speaking Knowledge of Spanish; Bilingual English/Spanish (Mother Tongue: English).