Seriously, folks, look it over before you hit send

So, I’m an intern. This might make me thoroughly unqualified for giving any kind of resume advice, but I’ve never been one to ignore an opportunity to expound on subjects about which I know nothing.

The organization for which I’m interning this summer, The Center for Independent Media, is a progressive media group. We have a number of sites in different states, including the Washington Independent. I’ve been organizing resumes and cover letters for a Capitol Hill reporter position that they’re hoping to fill within the month. There are a couple of points I’d like to make about applying for a job.

1) Seriously, folks, look your resume over for spelling and grammar issues. This is at the top of every single “Resume tips and hints” article I’ve ever read, and I still have cover letters that said “I’ve have professional work experience on Capitol Hill…,” another that read “Your one woman reporter, videographer, online web editor,” and a third that had the word referrals on her resume twice, spelled two different ways, neither of which was correct. I talked about a couple of these with the person who is actually doing the hiring, and he said I may as well throw those away and not even bother giving them to him. We have one 3-month position open and at least 50 resumes. It’s not even a matter of standing out from the crowd, if you have these kind of blatant mistakes you’re not even going to make it into consideration.

2) Research your organization. CIM bills itself as “a nonpartisan nonprofit organization,” but if you check out the sites it sponsors, it becomes very obvious very quickly that they’re actually pretty liberal. If you want a job with a liberal organization, you’re probably not going to get very far starting your cover letter with, “[Name] was appointed by President George W. Bush to currently serve at NASA…” It may or may not be fair, it may or may not be discrimination, but there’s a fairly good chance that if you’re a Bush political appointee, you’re not going to enjoy working for a progressive media company.

3) This goes along with researching the organization, but deserves a number of its own. We are a web site that publishes blogs and longer stories. We do a little video, but it’s mainly the type of video that does not require editing and is uploaded to YouTube. If you send your resume with a link to your work, and that work is entirely in front of a camera, i.e. being an anchor, we’re going to assume you did no research and have no idea what the job entails and will deposit you in the circular file. All of CIM’s news sites are linked from the homepage. It’s not hard.

4) The executive assistant who had to print out all the cover letters, resumes and clips for the hiring people to go through has said that she much prefers PDFs. In her ideal world, she would receive an email with a general, “I’m applying for the Capitol Hill reporter position. Attached are resume, cover letter and clips.” in the body. The cover letter and resume would be together in one PDF, the clips would be together in another. Two total attachments. She also told me that, in her experience, people in D.C. much prefer PDFs to word documents as attachments. Your mileage may vary on that, but she’s the gatekeeper for every resume that comes into this office.

5) I have no idea of the frequency of this, but I’ve listened to the hiring manager make several reference calls this summer. If you are not completely confident that the person you have listed as a reference will provide a glowing description of you and your work, don’t list them. Seriously. If that person has any problem with you or your work or your personality, it will come out in this phone call. The hiring guy got off one phone call earlier this month just shaking his head and laughing. When I asked him what he was laughing at, he said he had a candidate that was absolutely perfect on paper. Right experience, right clips, everything was great. But when he called one of the candidate’s references, he got a completely different story, and as a result of that phone call the candidate was out of the running. I’m not saying that you should lie, or that you should list a reference that’s going to lie for you. But, just as I wouldn’t put my former boss down as a reference because of the mutual personal hatred I felt for him, you shouldn’t put someone down who you think might say something that will make a hiring director think second thoughts.

Again, I don’t actually have a job right now, so you can take this with all the grains of salt you want. Still, having talked to hiring managers, I’m certainly taking these tips to heart.