You already know that prospective employers are looking for journalists with social media skills. The Statesman-Journal in Salem, Oregon, certainly is. Executive Editor Bill Church recently advertised an opening for a “talented reporter with high digital IQ.”
If you’re talented, aggressive, responsible, innovative, socially adept, digitally awesome and perpetually energized, you’ll fit in just fine at the Statesman Journal….Submit a 200-word cover letter, 3-4 clips showing range of work, and a resume…Or impress us with your digital coolness by Tweeting your online resume link to @BillChurchMedia.
A quick look at Church’s Twitter feed shows he’s had plenty of responses. Most of the time, he simply @replied with thanks. But not always.
Guenther’s online resume is worth a look. What sets it apart from several others who tweeted links to Church? First off, he’s gone to the trouble of getting his own URL, which indicates a certain level of familiarity with the Web. Second, it’s clearly a resume and not a blog. Everything you need to know about the job candidate is on one page, with embedded multimedia clips and links. There’s also a handy quick link at the top to download a PDF of the resume for off-line reading.
To create the page, Guenther used a free, do-it-yourself resume template . The HTML template is downloadable; you just edit the file in a text editor or Dreamweaver and then upload it to your website. Once the page was online, Guenther tells me he simply opened it and converted it to a PDF using Adobe Acrobat. He then uploaded the PDF to his own site and changed the code for the “Download PDF” button on the page so that it points to his PDF file. “You have to just know a little HTML,” he says, “but it’s a really nice template for sure.”
Guenther’s main site has a lot more bells and whistles, including Flash projects and a link to his blog. But when asked for a link to his resume, that’s exactly what he tweeted. More props to Guenther for clearly following directions–something employers also say they’re looking for.
[Thanks toIJNet for pointing us to the newspaper’s ad.]
