Building Bridges | Entry 8

Blog - Career Options Series

Theresa Casarin is the VP of Talent and Jade Yourth is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Creative Niche. Creative Niche, established in 2002, is a recruiting firm which seeks to build bridges between independent talent and clients, be it either by growing teams or sprouting professional relationships. Their focus revolves around design for digital and print media. Creative Niche collaborates with a diverse roster of clients from different levels. 

jade & theresa

Recipe for resume making

The main topic of Theresa and Jade’s presentation dealt with tips and tricks on how to construct an effective and impactful resume. Applying to jobs can be daunting, but now we have the comfort in knowing how to approach writing our resumes. How we market ourselves is important, and it’s starts off by knowing who we are. Jade mentioned taking the 16 Personalities online test to help us determine our strengths and weaknesses. Over a period of time, if you take the test again you’ll notice small changes in your personality which might help you decide what kind of career you’re looking for.

Theresa explained that our resumes are a snapshot of who we are and essentially a selling tool. Employers can see what type of value we could add to their company. In this digital age, being thoughtful and creative will help us get hired.

Each resume should cater to the position you are looking to get and showcase what makes you valuable. We shouldn’t cast away what’s relevant just because it is dated. Using action verbs, consistent tenses, no jargon or slang and avoiding general fluff are key points to resume writing. Having someone or a few other people proofread our resumes will help with checking the grammar and any typos. Apparently, 61% of recruiters will dismiss a resume because it contains typos. People don’t spend more than 6 seconds on a resume which I find to be a funny fact because we spend so much time creating them! 

A place to expand on our experiences is through LinkedIn. I never knew this before but our LinkedIn profiles are SEO so it’s super important to have the right keywords. Asking for recommendations on LinkedIn will also help with our credibility and will further support our skillset. The following are some exemplary LinkedIn profiles, Keisha Rose (Digital Marketer), Fred Illies (UX Designer), and Shuo Feng (Front End Developer).

Don’t let your portfolio stagnate

As visual creatives, it is important to keep our portfolios up to date. Feature work that is most recent and keep your navigation easy and simple to use. Personalize it, but also a have a clear place for people to contact you (include your phone number and email).  Theresa and Jade mentioned this link to a portfolio for inspiration.

Thank you Theresa and Jade for coming in to help us with building our future in the creative industry.