Create a hair-raising exciting internship resume. It’s worth it.

GrouperEye’s top 7 tips for your internship resume:

7. Be Specific. I launched a blog and received over 75 daily readers spending 3+ minutes reading my blog. Or, I wrote 67 articles related to Microfinance, published these online, and received 237 readers in the first 2 days.  You get the point, details matter.

6. Solve a problem. If you are applying for an internship at a small or medium size company, keep in mind that they just may be hiring you to solve a problem. They might be looking for you to provide a positive Return on Investment (ROI). For example, a hotel may know very little about social media and therefore producing less revenue than they would/could if they were knowledgable regarding social media. Bingo…you need to attempt to solve that problem. Do research and customize your internship resume so that (in this case, the hotel) knows you are perpared to execute.

5. Include one funny item. Showcasing personality in a sea of bland internship resumes can make you stand out. Remember, the recruiters reading these resumes spend approximately 8 seconds on each one. The goal of the funny item is to catch the reader’s attention, make him/her smile, and cause him/her to spend more that 8 seconds glancing at your resume. Risky? May be. Worth it? You bet!  In high school I used to perform magic tricks, so I put “Table Magician” on my resume.  Cheesy? Yes, but the recruiters  always brought that up in our interviews.

4. Organize with a purpose. 90% of students organize their internship resume with two headings:  ”Education” and “Work Experience.” Why? Because they read it in some book or their career service department told them to do so. Boring!  Do these two listings, “Education” and “Work Experience”  mark the very best way to classify and define your accomplishments and win an interview? Why do what everyone else is doing? Imagine reading through 50 internship resumes with these headings and then stumble up a refreshing internship resume with headings: “Remarkable Creations” and “Experiences Worth Talking About.”

3. Don’t forget the goal. The goal of the internship resume is to get someone/somebody to talk to you. That is it. Don’t focus on making something perfect if perfect isn’t what gets that someone to talk to you. Most students get the goals mixed up – the goal isn’t to create a one page document that records your history. I can’t stress this enough, the goal of any internship resume is to get someone/somebody to talk to you. That’s it!It is that simple!

2. Be different. Oh, what’s that? You have a 3.4 grade average from a reputable school, excel in a sport, and belong to the investment club. Guess what? So does everybody else! I posted an internship for GrouperEye, basically an unheard of company, and recieved 6 resumes from Ivy League students all with over a 3.3 GPA. My point is, the competition is all doing the same thing and if you compete on the same criteria – GPA, School, and Activities, you are probably going to lose to the girl who went to Cornell, plays volleyball, and has a 3.6. If you aren’t different, you won’t win.

1. Throw it away. Great internships, the internships people talk about for years afterwards, are never filled by an internship resume. Go meet people and do things.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.