Weeding through the stacks of resumes

When I was a child, I always looked forward to the long, lazy days the summer brought. No alarm clocks to wake me up, no homework to finish every night and lax bedtimes. But in the publishing business, summer is one of the busiest times of the year.

In my mind I always marked the beginning of the busy summer season when I handed out assignments for whatever summer supplement we had concocted, next came the traditional Fourth of July and apple pie features, followed by election coverage for local primaries, followed by runoffs that always seemed to coincide with the release of the No Child Left Behind scores. Of course, that was the same week school started and we wrapped up the Back to School tab. Then it’s Labor Day and another summer is over.
Mixed into the summer crunch is the barrage of resumes and clips from the newly graduated from J-School. Few summer days would go by without at least a couple resumes arriving in the mail.

Through the years I developed my own system for quickly scanning through the stacks of resumes and either tossing them and setting them aside for consideration. For instance, if the applicant doesn’t spell the name of the publication or my name correctly, forget about it. Into the recycle bin it goes. The same goes if there are no clips.

The all-time most bizarre application I received came when I worked at a weekly newspaper in Lake Tahoe about 10 years ago. It was a simple, single-page letter handwritten on a piece of notebook paper that had been ripped out of the pad with those little pieces of paper frayed along its edge (a pet peeve of mine). In it, the individual misspelled my name and the name of the paper and stated that his qualifications were that he occasionally read the newspaper. I still have that letter in my stacks of files.

The best application came in the form of twice-monthly phone calls over the course of six months. A young man started to call me in January one year looking for a job for when he graduated in the spring. I politely told him I didn’t have an opening, but that he could send a resume with clips. He did and then followed it up with at least two phones calls every month to tell me how much he wanted a job and to ask about any openings. It got to the point where the receptionist would just say, “That kid is on the phone again.”

Well, six months later I had an opening and hired him. With that kind of persistence, that’s someone I wanted in the newsroom. He proved to a be a tenacious, hardworking and gifted journalist, and a good friend. Today, Charles Levinson is the Baghdad Bureau Chief for USA Today.

My point is that a good “resume” isn’t always what is on a piece of paper. And, sometimes, the mailing label can tell you everything you need to know.
On a practical note, I can’t stress enough about checking references by phone or e-mail. I stopped relying on written references when two stellar references – including one from an international newspaper company – proved to be a load of garbage.

I implore anyone who’s agreed to be a reference – don’t give a reference if you don’t believe in the person’s abilities. I can’t stress this enough. Don’t even agree to be listed unless you’re willing to give an accurate account of the individual’s job performance.

I prefer references over the phone if you can catch an editor on deadline for five minutes of questions. When that doesn’t work, send them an e-mail with five to six questions.

Two of my favorite reference questions to ask are: Would you rehire the individual and would you want this person to write a story about you or a family member. The answers will tell you a lot.