Transcripts
1. Welcome: Hi, I'm Greg Langstaff. I'm a resume writer and interview coach with the Career Professionals of Canada. Now I've written hundreds of resumes over the years for clients in Canada and the United States and have also also spend about seven years as a recruiter and a hiring manager. Now a lot of my clients have been marketing professionals, and I've noticed a few tactics and key words that have been really useful in helping them find success in their job search. So what I wanted to do in this course is just combined all my experience as a resume strategist and a hiring manager to help you kind of walk through a step by step process to build that ideal resume and cover letter targeted at a marketing position. Um, now, to make things a little easier, and as a gift to you, I have uploaded to templates that are edible and downloadable. One is for a resume, and the other is for a cover letter, both sort of tailored to the marketing profession. And what we're gonna do through this course is just walking through how toe fill out those templates. And if you're not in the marketing feel free to download those templates is used them for something else and also check out some of the other videos on my my channel that might be useful for you.
2. Resume Writing Mindset: Now, before we get into the nuts and bolts of writing the resume and cover letter, I want to briefly go over the mindset that you need to write a great resume and cover letter. Uh, now you're already probably aware of this because you're a marketing professional. But when we're writing our resume, it's best to think of it as a marketing document, as is the cover letter, and the product is you eso. As with all marketing efforts, it's important to understand two things. First, what is our unique value proposition as a professional? And second, what are the key needs of our target audience? When we're aware of this as we create, our documents were able to tell the employer exactly what they need to know about us, to make it clear that were the right fit for their needs. Eso Throughout this course, we're gonna walk through how to answer each of those questions to demonstrate that we have the skills and experience that the employer is looking for in a clear and upfront manner. Eso in the next section. We're going to take just a couple of minutes and I'll show you how to read and interpret the job posting s so that you'll know exactly what keywords to use in your resume and cover letter and what skills and experiences you want to prioritize, uh, for your next marketing job. So let's jump right in.
3. A Little Research Goes a Long Way: as we talked about in the previous video, A big part of writing a successful resume and cover letter is understanding what the hiring manager is looking for so that we know which experiences to prioritize in which keywords we want to use in our documents. Luckily for for us, that information can be easily found by carefully reading and dissecting the job, posting from the marketing position to which we are applying. Now, as we dissect this job posting, we're just looking for two things. First, the specific job duties that they want us to be able to do, like manage social media accounts or design digital campaigns. One second we're looking for any work, behaviors or values that they mentioned. These could be things like working in a fast paced environment or ableto work independently . So to track these two pieces, I just make a simple graph like this. And as we fill out these two columns, we're gonna find the keywords which the hiring manager is looking for and also the keywords that we want to use to get through those automated resume scanners that companies use as well eso This way we're gonna know which experiences to place higher up on our resumes so they can quickly see how great we are. Um, I've created one of these tables for you to use in the project section of this course, but as you can see, this is something you can easily recreate yourself. Um, so the process is really simple. We're just gonna take a couple of minutes to work through an example now so you can see exactly how it's done. Now, I compiled this fictional job posting for marketing manager at Greg's basketball camp. But this is made of content from riel job postings for real marketing positions, and I just sort of compiled them together. Eso first. We're gonna look for job duties. Thes are really anything where they say the duties that we're going to do in this job. Eso Here we have good determining the vision on managing team, creating marketing and communications strategies, inbound marketing brand development, online presence, advertising, social media management event sponsorship and then managing budgets, collaborating with sales team on marketing strategy, design, integrated online campaigns and evaluate performance slash analytics dragging. Now you'll notice we've underlined most of the words in this posting already. This is pretty standard because a well written job posting really doesn't waste space on unimportant words. So just assume that everything, every word in the job posting means something to you. Eso Now we'll take a quick look at the work behaviours and values eso we've got health, wellness, leadership skills. We've also got family friendships, loyalty. And, of course, no job posting is complete without working in a fast paced environment. Now these behaviors and values are not as high of a priority for us to include on a resume , but more just good to know and may come into play in our cover letter or even the interview process. Finally, just a couple other words we want to make note of because they're clearly relevant. So marketing manager, job posting and a love of shooting hoops. Um, now, if they took the time to mention that they love something in the job posting, it's definitely important and worth keeping in mind. Eso Now, as we walk through the job posting, you'll find those words. You fill those words into a nice table like this, and this is going to be kind of your guiding document as you start to fill out the content in your resume and cover letter. Um, so congratulations. You've done your research, and now you're ready to start writing that dynamite marketing resume.
4. Opening Strong: all right. Now it's time to get into writing the content of barbarism me. So make sure you've opened up the resume template that I have in the course project section and we'll get started so naturally at the top of your resume, you're going to include your name and contact information. Here's a quick look at how I've arranged It s so feel free to fill that in yourself in the template, Um, now another. We've got the contact information and everything here. I like to throw in 1 to 2 titles that form sort of the key branding messages that we want the hiring manager to associate with us. So here's what that looks like. Um, for the first title, if applicable, I'll include the exact title of the job I'm applying to. However, if that's misleading because I haven't been a marketing manager before or VP of marketing, whatever it is, I might put something like experienced marketing, professional or social media marketing specialist or creative storyteller. Um so these are some examples of titles we can give ourselves to tell the hiring manager toe. Look at us as someone who fits into the category of what they're looking for. For the second bullet point, I want to highlight one of my key value. So I usually do something about leadership or relationships. Or in this case, both. This is a good time to look back at the list you made while dissecting the job posting. And if we look back, we'll see. Family friendships and leadership are listed, so we know relationships are important. Thus, we used relationship focused leader. Um, next I like to do just a little summary sentence that references a few more key items that we found in the job posting eso. We know that creativity and strategy and analysis or high priorities of this employer. So all right, a quick summary that references those things. So here we have creative marketing strategist with analytical approach towards performance improvement. Um, sounds pretty nice to me. Next, we'll just throw in a couple of dots for separation. And then, um, I like to use just like a little borderless table. And you can find this in the template I gave you, uh, to include some of our key skills that really make sure we're checking all the boxes for the hiring manager on the automated scanners as well. So at this point, go back to your list of job related functions that you found during the dissection in the previous video on For all of these that you have done in some shape or form, just plug them into the table like this. Now this table is three rows by four columns. But if you have more or fewer more or less key skills, you can add or subtract columns and rows as needed. Um, this is a pretty solid opening, and you also notice in the template that there's an objective statement, which you can take some time to plug in your own your own objectives there. I like to reference the work that I've done in the past and education and then sort of directed exactly at this particular job that I'm applying to. And then I'll change that with every job application. So they know I'm looking for that exact type of job. Um, yeah, and then we'll get into professional experience in the next video
5. Professional Experience: listing and describing our professional experience is one of the most important parts of ready it resume. A lot of people make the major mistake mistake of simply describing the duties they had in that job in each job that they're listing. And the problem here is that the hiring manager is not only interested in what you dated, you passed in your past rules, but also how well you did it. So I'm going to show you now how to write an accomplishment focused resume that highlights some of our most impressive marketing achievements. Um, so we got our professional experience heading than company location and dates underneath that will list our job title. And if we had multiple titles with that company, will do the dates for the specific, the specific position in brackets, and underneath that we're going to write a short paragraph with 2 to 4 lines. But what are responsibilities were in this job? I'll break that down for you now. So, as you can see here, I like to start with who we were reporting to in the organization just to give some context next, because our target job wants us to be able to manage and collaborate with the sales department on Manage a team of marketing professionals. We're gonna tell them we did just that and then finally will list off some of the high level duties again, using phrases from the job duties listed on our targeted job posting. Next, we're going to get into some accomplishments. So here I like to use a little heading called key accomplishments and then we'll insert a few bullets. Um, Now what I'm gonna do is I'll show you a couple just like this on, then we'll break them down later so you can know how to write your own on. If you need to borrow any of this language, feel free to do so so you can take a look at this 1st 1 Um, here we have developed and and integrated digital Sorry. Developed an integrated digital marketing campaign to support the launch of a new online store, creating engaging video and graphic content used on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, resulting in over 500 page likes 1200 new followers and ultimately contributing to the achievement of 120% of opening week sales targets. I've got a couple of more here designed a comprehensive brand toolkit for awesome company, including logo, color, scheme, typeface and brand values. Created a training document to support on brand marketing and trained over 40 staff on implementation. And one more just for your reference managed the strategic usage of online promotional platforms, including Facebook, AdSense, Facebook and INSTAGRAM. Ad manager or ads. Lincoln adds influence or promotions, affiliate marketing and an annual mark on an annual marketing budget of $75,000. So let's take a look at how these bullet points are broken down. You can see bullet points typically will range anywhere from 1 to 4 lines. And so my rule of thumb on this is as long as you're talking about something relevant and you're not taking space away that you need to describe other accomplishments, any length of bullet point is just fine. Um, now, as for how many bullet points, it's really going to depend on how many relevant accomplishments you've got in that particular job. The only trend I've noticed over the years is that most the most recent jobs and most relevant jobs will usually take up a bit more space s so keep that in mind as you're arranging a resume? No, let's break down this first bullet point cause it's a great example. Oven outward, facing deliverable with tangible results on it's extremely relevant to the job or applying to you. So here it is once again, and they're also there are three key pieces that we ideally want a fit into each bullet point. The first are action verbs. So in this bullet point, we've got three developed, integrated and creating these three great action verbs. So make sure when you're writing bullet points you have at least one. And ideally, it will be the first word in the bullet point to dry in the reader. If you need any help finding action verbs that very easy to find on Google so you can look those up next. We want specific detail as to what you did. So here's another great chance to reference the job duties we found in the job posting earlier. So here we have digital marketing campaign, uh, launch of a new online store, working on engaging video and graphic content using Facebook, instagram and Twitter. See you and we hear we name the specific social media platforms to give a bit more specific picture of what we did on. Finally, we've got our results. Eso here we have our page likes followers. Then we even have a contribution to overall sales of the store. Now, in the perfect scenario, we'd have results like these with nice numbers to use, so we can quantify how well we did in each of our tasks. But if not, that's OK, too, and you can see from some of my other bullet points. There's other ways to show your results, even if you don't have those kind of numbers. Now I have a bullet point activity that I've created, so feel free to use that to kind of walk through and start to Bill. You build your own bullet points, and I know this is one of the more challenging skills of writing a resume, so feel free to post what you've got in the course, and I'll give you some feedback
6. Education: now, the education section is pretty straightforward, but I'm just going to show you a few variables that might apply to you. Eso First off, we're going to use the same heading as we did for professional experience. You list the school location and graduation date, and if you haven't graduated, just put the expected graduation date here. Underneath will write the title of the credential on then. In a lot of cases, you don't really need anything under the credential. But we have a few options. So here, I'll show you've completed a thesis. That's something you can include. Or if you have a particularly impressive G p A. I would include that as well. No, if you've got multiple credentials for stuff, Congratulations, Um and, yeah, you just want to include them most recent to these recent kind of like this, Um, and one more thing. So let's say, you know, sometimes we started on education and we didn't complete it. Um, I think in most cases it's quite valuable to still show that you completed a part of a degree even if you didn't finish it. So to do this well, just name the same gonna think the university or college the location. And then we're going to do the start, date and end date under. That will include the subject we were pursuing. However, we won't list the Fokker 10 drugs. That could be a bit misleading on then. Also in brackets how many years we completed. And finally, just to validate our learning, we can include a list of the courses completed just to show that even though we didn't finish the degree, we still learned a lot of these useful skills in this academic setting. Um, and again, if these are there any skills on the job posting that you looked at that you learned about in school, make sure to privatize, including those on this list here. So now that you've got your education listed on your resume, we're gonna talk really briefly about volunteer experience.
7. Volunteer Experience: Now let's talk about how to include volunteer experience in your resume. I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but there's a couple of points that I think it would be really valuable for you to hear eso first off, there's two types of volunteering experience, in my opinion that you could list on your resume. The first and more important, is a volunteer experience where you were taking on complex responsibilities and building relevant skills. Essentially, you were holding a job where you just weren't paid. These are especially useful if you're a student or a recent graduate, and you were involved in things like student clubs or student government. The's experiences experiences are highly valuable and should definitely get some space on your resume. The second type of volunteer experience simply shows that you're a good person who volunteers their time to help with the good cause. So both are useful. One more than the other measure you had toe include both of those now. So for the working volunteer experience, we're gonna present it very similar to how we do an actual job. So will include the place of work and location. The dates opposition title and then because I'm assuming you are including this a little later in your breast, May will jump straight into bullet points that you can use to highlight both your responsibilities and any accomplishments in that rule. So they might look something like this. When we're listing the second type of volunteer work, you can do the same heading and simple one line bullet point that explains your responsibilities. Or if you have lots of volunteer experience in your shortness base, you could do a simple list just like this.
8. Additional content: Now that we've got a nice intro and or work experience, education and volunteer experience, let's talk about some of the additional content we can include in our marketing resume eso specifically here. I'm gonna talk a bit about technical proficiency, ease certificates and awards. You can include now some marketing jobs air going to require you to be able to use specific software, um, or have other technical skills. So when you're describing the work you did, it's important to reference those specific Softwares in your bullet points. But it's also helpful to pack to them together in a list. And that list might look something like this. Um, now, when it comes to certificates, if we're talking about completing a certificate from college or university or anything, any sort of a professional designation, I would say, feel free to include that in your education section. But if it's something a little less substantial, like a certificate awarded by an employer or completing a minor training, I like to save space by including those Among the other awards that we've won in a section like this. Um no, because the these elements are gonna be included at the end of your resume. We may or may not have space left to describe these eso. I'll show you sort of a short and a long version of certifications and awards. Um, so if you've got a bit of room, you can include Theo Ward or certificate. Name the awarding organization and the year in a top line. And then if you have room for a bullet point underneath, you can take a line or two to describe why you won the award or the subject matter that was covered in the certificate. Uh, no. If you've got too many items to include here, take a look back at your dissection of the job posting and you can decide what you would want to show that are most relevant to your hiring manager. And then you can kind of list them in a nice short list that might look a little something like this
9. Arranging Your Resume: now there's no right or wrong way to arrange a resonate. In fact, it's really going to depend on your experience and what you're trying to accomplish. So if you're a student or recent grad, there might be a one way to do it. And if you are more experienced or you're applying to technical job, there's another. So I'm gonna break down those three angles for you. Here s O far less experienced applicants Feel free to start, I would say Start with your contact information and then next your headline, objective statement and key skills, just like we talked about earlier. Then I'd suggest listing your education because it is its most recent and it explains where you're at in life. Next. For our less experienced applicants, feel free to combined your work and volunteer experience into one section on. Of course, when I say volunteer experience here, I'm talking about that first type of volunteer experience where you developed job related skills and you just weren't being paid. Um, you can call this section relevant experience on. I sometimes get some push back on this, but if you're just starting out, ah, hiring manager is much more interested in your work as vice president of communications for your University Archery Club. Then they would be about your summer job at Dairy Queen ESO. After the work experience, you can fit in any technical proficiency, ease awards and certifications and any other content you've got. If you're more experienced and you've got maybe 345 even 10 plus years in the work floors, um, we're going to start out the same way. But then, after we've listed are key skills were gonna dive right into work experience, and after that it's pretty flexible, so feel free to improvise if it suits you better. One exception for the more experienced positions is, if you're applying to a marketing position in an educational environment than the education piece will be more highly valued, and you might want to move that up above work experience. Um, finally, if you're buying Teoh marketing or a communications position that requires ah, highly technical skill set, such as the ability to use specific software or equipment, make sure those technical skills are up above the work experience. So it's a nice and easy to see. Um, keep in mind arranging the resume is very flexible process. So if you feel the need to make some alterations to these suggestions, go ahead, give it a try and see how it looks.
10. Formatting Your Resume: now, for some people, myself included, formatting is a lot of fun. For others, it might be a bit tedious, but whatever side you're on here are 10 formatting tips to keep in mind as you create your marketing resume first. Unless you're an executive or someone with 15 plus years experience, try to keep your resume toe 1 to 2 pages. Uh, next if you're writing a job experience and it crosses over from Page one to Page to make sure you mark it with a to be continued on Page two on the bottom of the first page and something like a marketing quarter and a coordinator at Awesome Company continued in brackets at the top of the next page, just so you don't leave anyone hanging, keep the funds simple. Um, I prefer calibri or times New Roman or Tahoma. Um, I also find using the small caps function makes the headings look nice and professional, so whatever you choose font wise, just stick with it. Same goes with font size body text. Keep it between 10 and 11 Um, for headings. It really depends on how much space you have, but just try to keep the formatting of your headings. Consistent. Uh, now, if you're writing any line, whether it be a bullet point or paragraph or something else, try to bring that line as close as you can to the end of the page to the right side of the page. Um, and a very least don't leave one or two lines. Sorry. Wanted to words on a line by themselves. It just looks a little bit awkward off color. I stick to black for the body and then navy blue whenever I'm feeling like adding a little bit of flair in the headings, as you've already seen. But feel free to deviate from Navy blue. Just make sure you're keeping it professional, and you don't turn your resume into sort of a comic book looking, uh, document. Next, make sure to use blank lines between all of your sections. We just don't want to crowd up our resume or make it look like two unrelated pieces are related to each other. So the rule for this is just to let it breathe for margins. I have had success with standard, and sometimes I'll go narrow if necessary. When you're using bold text, just don't overdo it. I mean, if you use it for headings, that's totally fine. Some people like to bold keywords among blocks of text. That's okay to just keep it to a couple of key pieces because it doesn't lose its power. As you start to bold more and more content on finally, just save the formatting for after you've written all your content because you will drive yourself up the wall. If you keep constantly shifting back and forth between formatting and content writing eso just don't stress yourself out on this. Think of it as first. You're kind of building your mound of clay and then you get to form it into your beautiful sculpture.
11. Resume Scanner Tips: Now, many of you already know that almost every company is now using what's called an applicant tracking system or 80 s to scan the hundreds of online applications they receive so that the hiring managers are really only viewing the resumes, which the 80 s deems worthy. Now, applicant tracking systems can be a bit finicky, and you don't want your amazing resume to get thrown out before it's even read eso. Just follow these 10 pieces pieces of advice to improve your odds of getting through the scanning process. So first, just keep your formatting simple. A nice, clean format is your best bet for getting through the Scanner two is using keywords now. Most, if not all relevant keywords can be found somewhere in the job posting. So just use that as a reference point like we mentioned earlier in this course. Um, now 80 SS are also programmed to detect keyword stuffing, so just make sure that you're not over using each keyword eso stick to, you know 234 times if it's relevant. But try not to overdo it because they will pick up on that next. Avoid the use of graphics or images 80 s systems have a lot of trouble reading these. And informational often get lost next, just to keep your fonts to something common that we talked about earlier. Um, no. It can be tempting to justify your text to get those nice, clean lines at both the left and the right side of your paragraphs. However, the scanners have issues with justification, especially when it leaves big gaps between the words eso you really don't want to risk this and risk the 80 s missing out on important content, so keep it less left justified. Uh, next, within each section b a professional experience, volunteer experience Just list everything from most recent to least recent. This allows 80 s to calculate, for example, how many's your years of experience you have. Um, now, some 80 s systems can't read headers and footers, so I would just avoid those all together. Um, now, when you're labeling your sections with a section header, which is not to be confused with the header on a word document, keep your titles generic eso You know it will be nice to be able to call our experience, marketing experience or management experience, But the 80 s systems of the readers don't really like this. So we keep our headings to the generic professional experience, Volunteer experience, etcetera, Um, talked about colors, keeping simple. So just do that to the 80 s, will be able to read everything and finally remember your end goal. And as you abide by all this formatting and resume scanner advice, remember that at the end, when you get through the 80 s, it still has to look nice because a real person is then going to read it. Now, there are some online services that will give you a free trial to show you have a T s will read your resume s. So if you're not sure how you doing, run your resume through one of those for some feedback.
12. Cover Letter: Okay, let's talk cover letter. Now. I'm often asked how important the cover letter is in the application process, and the answer to that varies. I really could see a time coming when the cover letter is not standard practice. But for now, we need to write and include a cover letter. So, formatting the cover letter. Very simple for the heading. We're going to use the same exact heading you did on your resume on. Then you're just address the company at the top of their name address in city province state postal slash zip code. Whatever. Here, um, and then for addressing the cover letter if you know the name of the hiring manager included, but otherwise, dear hiring manager will work just fine. Um, for the content, I like to think of the cover letter. It's a tiny version of the standard five paragraph essay from high school eso In the intro paragraph, you're basically announcing that you're applying to the job and then telling them 2 to 3 key traits that you have that will make you good for the job on, as I'm sure you can guess we're gonna find those 32 or three key traits on the table we made when we dissected the job posting earlier. Eso opening paragraph might look something like this, and I'll give you a few seconds to read this over. But it's also available to you in the cover letter template that I uploaded to this course . So feel free to copy this language and just adjust the parts that you need. Um, in the 2nd 3rd and fourth paragraph, we're gonna briefly explain three the three key experiences which we listed in the first paragraph. And I've got a formula for this, which looks pretty simple. So here's Here's the paragraph. I know it's a bit daunting to look at right now, but I'm gonna break this down for you because it's really the same four sentences, every paragraph. So the 1st 1 we're gonna just explain why this skill is important. Eso you know, it's a central for your next marketing manager to have a strong ability to lead a team of creative marketing professionals in sentenced to we're gonna list the job and task we were doing where we gained that skill. So in my previous role, its marketing coordinator at ABC Company I led a team of six content creators and community managers to design and implement a variety of integrated digital campaigns. So that's the time that we we did get that experience send in ST. We're just gonna briefly explain what we learned from that experience. So throughout this rule, I learned the value of empowering my team and giving them the creative space to collaborate and use their talents to yield the best end product and then finally in sentence, for we're just going to tell them that we we want to bring that skill to their team. And there's a lot of different ways to do this. And I've given you a few examples of this in that final template. Um, now, if you don't have room for for three of these paragraphs, that's okay, too, too is fine. Um, so here's what it might look like. And then, if you also have room, I like to include a little heading to just kind of break up the bodies of the paragraph. So above each of your three body paragraphs, you'll have a little heading so they know what they're about to read, and you could see those in the template. So we'll jump down now to the final paragraph. Uh, and here we're just sort of thanking them for reading our application and telling them a bit about what we like about the organization. Feel free to kind of borrow the wording I used here and just alter for your own purposes. This is also available in the template. Um, yeah. So if you've used this formula and you've exceeded one page in length, I'd recommend you do your best to cut it down toe one page, which is standard practice for cover letters. Eso if you need to cut out some of the detail from your three body paragraphs or your intro or you want Teoh even caught one of those paragraphs out. So you've just got a four paragraph cover letter. That's totally fine as well. Priority is definitely keeping it toe one beach. And that concludes the lesson on reading cover letter
13. Good luck: All right, We've reached the end of the course. I hope this was helpful in preparing you to write your marketing resume and cover letter and pursue that next marketing job with confidence. If I could get you to take one thing away from this course, it would be to spend those first few critical minutes dissecting the job posting. Ah, lot of applicants don't do that. So it's a very easy way for us to rise to the top of the list of people who apply to the job. Um, Now, if you're not feeling quite ready yet, make sure you do all the activities, post them for feedback or reach out to me in the comments and let me know how how else I can help you out. So this is the end. Good luck.