The resume, you definitely want to talk about your education. You want to talk about your experience. And the experience includes volunteer work. It can include internships, it can include actual work experience. But you want to highlight things that you do that are important to who your new customers are. You don’t want to talk about retail sales if your customer doesn’t care about retail sales. You’ve got to give him what he wants to hear.

So talk about the promotional work you’ve done, talk about the experience in concerts or bands or whatever it is, the management side. Whatever it is that you think your customers want, that’s the experience you need to highlight.

You then want to talk about community service, things that you’ve done. People want to hire people who are well rounded, that don’t just go home after work and sit down and watch some television and that’s all they do. They need you to network for them. They need you to build relationships. So they want to see that you’re comfortable in those environments. They also want to see that he has lots of interests. So community service and activities at school and things like that help as well there.

If you don’t have a lot of experience, or if your experience doesn’t highlight what you can do really well, you may want a section that talks about relevant coursework. Courses and projects you have completed while in school, that once again are evidence to information they’re going to need to use. So you might want to talk about taking a contract and negotiations class. Or you might want to talk about taking a musical promotions class or something. And if you have a project you can back it up with, that makes it even more tangible. It’s not just, I learned the theory, but I learned how to apply it. So those are the kinds of things you want to put on your resume.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make with their resume is, first of all, their spelling check, spelling problems all over it. And typos all over it. Huge mistake. Don’t do it, it shows sloppy work, lack of an eye for detail, disorganization. There are a thousand things I can tell you about typos that people don’t understand that we tend to jump to the conclusion with.

But they also tend to have their name kind of small and their address really large and then what they’ve done in their degree even smaller. Whether you live on St. Charles Avenue or not is not going to get you a job. That should be the smallest thing on the page. It needs to be there. In case they do want to talk to you, they need to know how to contact you. But that’s not going to sell you on this position.

So talk about what you’ve done, highlight that education, highlight that experience, highlight that class project that you did. But your address is kind of second to all of it. Put it down at the bottom, or make it small at the top. Whatever you do.

What else can you do on your resume? Create a look that’s real. And good for you, avoid the templates in Word. Avoid them. They look like everybody else’s resume. The average job, now I’m not a professional in the business, in the music business area, but the average job that is listed in the newspaper gets over 300 applicants. Over 300 applicants. So you’re one of a stack of resumes. So you need yours to pop up and say, look at me. It can’t look like 50 other ones in the stack. Still need to look professional, but it needs to be unique to you. So create a format that looks really, really good and clean and easy to read. Keep it to one page if possible, two pages is okay if you give people a compelling reason to read two pages. But if you bore them on one pages, you’re really going to bore them on two. So keep it down, you know, to one or two pages at the most.

The typical student graduating from college would start with, actually, they would start with the qualifications or a profile or value proposition section that basically says in 3 to 8 bullets this is why you want to read my resume. This is what I’m going to bring to the table for you.

After that should most likely be education. Every now and then I see a student whose experience is even stronger than their education. But typically with most of the music business students I’ve worked with what we found is they have a lot of experience, but it’s their degree that sets them apart from the other folks with experience in that resume stack. It’s that degree that just kind of gives them the extra punch, so why hide that at the bottom of the page? Put it up at the top and then follow it up with your education.

I hate objectives. Absolutely hate objectives. I’ve read one objective in the last 6 years that actually was exciting. I pulled from my old journalism training from many years ago, never, ever bury your lead. And an objective tends to say stuff like looking for a great job in marketing to, what, that will allow me to expand my career experience and have growth. Who cares? You, you’ve just wasted 3 or 4 lines and you have 15 seconds, if you’re lucky, for them to read your resume. And you’ve bored them from the very first line.

So get in there with something punchy at the top, that value proposition. This is what I’m going to bring to the table. The other thing about objectives is objectives are about you. I want a job that will do blah, blah, blah. Well, if you go back to your basic marketing principles, in sales, it’s about the customer’s needs, not your needs. So what you need to do is give them information about how you’re going to solve their problem. And ultimately, your career success will follow.

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