Help Me Get This Awesome Entry-Level Marketing Job!
January 14, 2014 8:23 PM   Subscribe

I know I'd be an excellent fit and have similar experience to the job listing. I've worked for the experiential marketing company through which they're recruiting for and I did really well on my first program, earning two top incentives and a really good starting reputation with the company. Can you help me get this position by taking a look at my relevant experience and helping me frame it in an appealing, successful way? Can you give me tips on how to stand out from the thousands of applicants? Is anything about the way I've written my experience confusing/bland (other than the intentional vague-ening of the details, of course)? Please help me! Thanks so much.

The job details:

'Full-time summer internship for huge national beer company:

-Accountable for merchandising and promotional setup of Beer Company branding and point-of-sale materials at restaurants, bars, beer stores, etc. across your district.

-Setting up beer gardens at community events, working evening & weekend events

-Looking for competitive university students with experience in sales, excellent work ethic, drive to win'


I already work for the huge experiential marketing company through which they're recruiting. These are my relevant experience listed on my resume:

Relevant Work Experience
"Brand Ambassador – Experiential Marketing Brand Representative
Top Experiential Marketing Company
[December 2013 – Present (2 months)]


Representing various Fortune 500 companies on-field, actively engaging customers using branded tools with the aim to increase brand awareness, improve image and ultimately assist in raising sales.

*Carrying out various experiential marketing tasks and duties: setting up promotional equipment, intercepting consumer traffic, tracking and recording consumer interactions and reactions, creating daily qualitative and quantitative reports, performing sales hand-offs.

*Build strong relationship with permanent sales staff, consistently hit sales, engagements and other targets and proactively assist in helping create sales with new customers.

*Finished first program [Big Cell Phone Provider's Holiday Sales Assist] with a strong relationship with the sales team, a job offer from the client’s hiring manager and two top incentives for my performance.

Campus Brand Ambassador
Cool Multinational Online Food Delivery Service Company
[September 2013 – October 2013 (1 month contract)]


Promoted the brand on campus: created relationships with student groups, student unions and other school organizations, leveraged promotional materials and personal connections to raise brand awareness.

*Wore branded T-Shirt throughout the month on campus. Promoted the brand on the Campus Radio’s launch event, spoke on-air about Just Eat. Promoted at various events, giving branded materials as prizes to attendees in exchange for a chance to speak to the crowd about the brand.

*Obtained three days of promoting the brand at a designated table in front of the student centre, entered dozens of students to company’s nation-wide contest. Hosted branded promotional pub night and handed out promotional vouchers and other items to spread brand awareness.

*Finished month-long contract having hit the contest-entry targets, improved brand image on campus and built strong relationship between brand and student groups on-campus. "


Can you help me get this position by taking a look at my relevant experience and helping me frame it in an appealing, successful way? Can you give me tips on how to stand out from the thousands of applicants? Is anything about the way I've written my experience confusing/bland (other than the intentional vague-ening of the details, of course)?

Please help me! Thanks so much.
posted by rhythm_queen to Work & Money (9 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
You've got some of this, but include even more numbers/facts/results. Can you quantify dozens? Is that "over 50" or "110" or something more specific? How many vouchers did you hand out?
posted by radioamy at 8:54 PM on January 14, 2014


If you already work for them, you don't need to describe what you do (they already know what your job description is), you need to describe what you've accomplished, and what you'll aim to accomplish. In your job descriptions, prioritize your successes first, your duties second.

For this job, it sounds like anecdotes about relationship building skills (re: working with restaurants etc), leadership abilities (re: working with teams to set up beer gardens), and reliability (ie. you won't miss shifts or be late) would be great to add or clarify.

If you have reference letters from any of your old supervisors, it can be effective to put excerpts from the letters right in your resume, showing who the quotes are from.
posted by Kololo at 8:57 PM on January 14, 2014


Response by poster: Wow! Thanks for the awesome help already. I gave away hundreds, perhaps thousands of vouchers and used vouchers/other promo items as leverage to trade / barter services from different university associations/groups (using vouchers to fund the food for an event, giving away swag as prizes at different events in exchange for a chance to promote, etc. ) For the more recent job, I spoke to more than 100 consumers an hour and obtained thousands of surveys from consumers through the 5 weeks. I also took amazing photos of/with consumers and did high quality reporting. It won me a $300 gift card, the top incentive of our region's team.

How could I potentially include excerpts from the letters? Could I use quotes they've sent to me in emails about how well I'm doing, or things they've said to me in conversation? How would that look, formatting-wise? Would I need to include their information to verify their quotes, too?

I'm receiving actual recommendation letters from both jobs soon, hopefully, but both of the supervisors have enthusiastically agreed to let me list their info as references for future positions.

BTW: Quick question - how ethical or effective is writing a recommendation letter for yourself and having your supervisor endore it/ sign it? I've had profs/bosses ask me to do this and it icks me out, but if a supervisor has dismal writing skills or is it too busy, is this excusable?
posted by rhythm_queen at 9:09 PM on January 14, 2014


Awesome, sounds like you're off to a good start - its so much easier when you actually do have accomplishments to show off!!

Re: the quotes, i would only put in stuff that you explicitly have permission to use this way. So, either from a recommendation letter, or if it was more informal (like an email), you'd want to ask their permission. ("Hey, can i quote you on that in my cover letter or resume, as a reference?") I've done stuff like "Client Smith said "Kololo was the best Askme answerer during the night of January 15th"). Just add it in as a bullet point, or to provide credibility to a claim you're making. (ie. "Spoke with more than 100 consumers an hour, earning a reward. According to Susan, this was "the best she'd ever seen a rep do".)

Writing your own recommendation letter is totally ethical if they've asked you to do it, and it's common place. It's an icky feeling to do it, but your supervisors are too busy to do it themselves. They'll likely read what you wrote and edit it a bit before they sign it, or they'll read it and then sign it, but either way, don't be afraid to toot your own horn if they aren't afraid to let you.
posted by Kololo at 9:26 PM on January 14, 2014


Best answer: These are my preliminary edits/advice. (I work in marketing btw. My LinkedIn is linked in my profile and you are welcome to view it as well.) Notes are below as organized as possible.

Relevant Work Experience
--
++I would just call this "Professional Experience" or "Marketing Experience. The term 'Relevant' is a little generic.
--
"Brand Ambassador – Experiential Marketing Brand Representative
Top Experiential Marketing Company
[December 2013 – Present (2 months)]

Representing various Fortune 500 companies on-field, actively engaging customers using branded tools with the aim to increase brand awareness, improve image and ultimately assist in raising sales.
--
++ Did you AIM to increase awareness, improve image, and assist in raising sales or did you "Raise awareness, increase brand awareness, and improve image. Ultimately my brand ambassadorship increased sales." Reading this section, I want to see what you DID, if you say you "aimed" to do it, then it makes me think you didn't succeed.
--
*Carrying out various experiential marketing tasks and duties: setting up promotional equipment, intercepting consumer traffic, tracking and recording consumer interactions and reactions, creating daily qualitative and quantitative reports, performing sales hand-offs.

*Build strong relationship with permanent sales staff, consistently hit sales, engagements and other targets and proactively assist in helping create sales with new customers.

*Finished first program [Big Cell Phone Provider's Holiday Sales Assist] with a strong relationship with the sales team, a job offer from the client’s hiring manager and two top incentives for my performance.
--
++ Okay, overall here, whip out a thesaurus and use action verbs. Tell me what you did in the JOB, not setting up the job. For example, have specific bullets about what marketing duties you did. Setting up equipment sounds like setting up a table and chairs, if you did more than that then be specific about your setup skill set. Example "Maintained a strong relationship with the sales team..." I like "Creating daily quantitative and qualitative reports" Expand on that. I think a lot of these can be more specific and broken out to really tell us more about that item.
--
Campus Brand Ambassador
Cool Multinational Online Food Delivery Service Company
[September 2013 – October 2013 (1 month contract)]

Promoted the brand on campus: created relationships with student groups, student unions and other school organizations, leveraged promotional materials and personal connections to raise brand awareness.

*Wore branded T-Shirt throughout the month on campus. Promoted the brand on the Campus Radio’s launch event, spoke on-air about Just Eat. Promoted at various events, giving branded materials as prizes to attendees in exchange for a chance to speak to the crowd about the brand.

*Obtained three days of promoting the brand at a designated table in front of the student centre, entered dozens of students to company’s nation-wide contest. Hosted branded promotional pub night and handed out promotional vouchers and other items to spread brand awareness.

*Finished month-long contract having hit the contest-entry targets, improved brand image on campus and built strong relationship between brand and student groups on-campus. "
--
++ Same advice, I want to know about these things. How did you leverage the promotional materials to raise brand awareness? What did you do? Did you create a marketing campaign? How did you create these relationships and hold them? Tell me about your skills. What makes you better and leveraging brand awareness than the average joe?

++ Also, change or delete "Wore branded t-shirts" Hard-love here - anyone can wear a t-shirt on campus. Tell us that your enthusiasm in the program or something. And again, how did you
promote these? Were they successful? How successful. Number are great!

--

My overall advice is to use a thesaurus, tell us specifics, tell us about YOUR skills, etc. In addition, I like to write, then print and scribble all over my resume. Read these things out loud. Do they sound like someone you would hire? Imagine the interviewer saying "So I read here that you...." Does it sound good? Can you make it sound better?

Good Luck.
posted by Crystalinne at 9:26 PM on January 14, 2014


What jumps out at me the most is that you've explained what you did...but what did you DO? It's a lot like if I explained my job as, "Sat in my office, looked at records, typed a summary, and presented summary to Boss." Yeah, that's (kind of) what I do, but it's not what I DO. My resume would say something like, "Managed # concurrent cases, including analysis of blah blah blah, investigation of blah blah blah, comprehensive status reports for clients and attorneys, deposition preparation, and deadline management, in order to quickly and successfully resolve complex claims." (A little rambly, but yeah.) If you want to impress this (or any) potential employer, you need to show them that you can not only do these things but that you understand WHY you're doing these things, i.e., you understand the brand's goals beyond "I earned incentives." It's also very important to showcase concrete accomplishments (which my example does not do very well) as much as possible. (On preview, Crystalinne has great advice for doing just that.)

I would cut the "wore a t-shirt" and/or find a way to make it sound less like you wore a t-shirt. (I'm sure there's some great way of talking about your in-person, live radio, on-campus promotional and branding activities--which is awesome experience--so stick it in there, but not as "I wore a t-shirt.") I would cut the "got offered a job from a client" thing; it screams "me me me." It sounds counter-intuitive to not be "me me me" in a resume, but employers want to know what you're bringing to their table, not to yours. Lastly, be consistent in your verb usage, e.g., you went from using gerunds to present-tense to past-tense all in one job. I'm the meanest recruiter in all the land, because that would put you in my "probably not" pile of internship candidates, as it shows a lack of attention to detail and potential sloppiness. Conversely, you write well, and I appreciate that you use straight-forward, simple language; as much as I nitpick inconsistent tenses, I usually won't consider someone who clearly spent a couple hours reconstituting every locution with a serpentine restoration from a promulgation-hampered online treasury of words (haha I wish I was kidding but I'm not). That is to say: it's cool to use a thesaurus but don't use words from it that you don't know. Good luck!
posted by coast99 at 9:41 PM on January 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


Response by poster: I'm really not trying to threadsit, promise! Amazing answers, definitely making me feel silly :P "Wore a T-Shirt"...Lol, really? What was I thinking?

One more quick question though: I REALLY want to talk about how during my month-long contract with food delivery company, I was the ONLY brand ambassador at my whole uni while across the country, the company hired at least 2-3 per university campus (the other brand ambassador for my uni bailed last minute). I want to write that despite the fact I was given 0 structure, very little training and advice and even without a partner, I'd managed to meet my targets, promote at MANY different events across campus, keep in constant contact with my supervisor and overall, do the same amount of work as 2-3 people. How can I do this? Is this the meant for a cover letter/in-person interview?
posted by rhythm_queen at 9:57 PM on January 14, 2014


Don't ever be negative about a former employer/boss/co-worker, no matter how good it makes your performance look. Keep it positive. Say something like: "With minimal supervision, singly promoted # of campus events with attendance rate of #. Met all assigned targets by doing X, Y, Z." When you get asked "tell me about a time you faced a challenging situation" at the interview, then you come in with, "Unfortunately, my promo teammate could not commit to the internship/position/whatever and there was no time to find a replacement, which lead to [this situation]. Accordingly, I [took these actions], which led to [this positive outcome]. I learned A, B, and C from the experience." Again, always keep it positive and try as hard as you can to avoid disparaging a former employer, even in the slightest.

Resumes are hard, but once you hit the mark, the pay off is definitely worth it. I didn't mean to come down so hard on the t-shirt; it's marketing, it's promotional, and it's part of the job -- but if someone can genuinely ask "so, what?" to a bullet point on your resume, it needs to be improved upon. Each bullet point has to be both self-explanatory and concise, which is why resumes are hard. (For example, when I was in marketing, I had to attend plays. I couldn't just put "attended plays" on my resume, because...so, what? I had to think it through and really pinpoint why I was going to the plays and what it meant for my job and my employer. And then I had to decide if it was worth the space on my resume. It wasn't.)
posted by coast99 at 10:37 PM on January 14, 2014


Try an infographic resume.
posted by Rainflower at 2:52 AM on January 15, 2014


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