Advertising and marketing encompass a vast variety of positions across industries while remaining a continuously evolving field. As such, advertising resume writing is diverse and varied too. Whether you are a digital marketer, brand manager, copywriter, or analyst, you are at the forefront of emerging trends guiding modern storytelling across media.
While providing a catered, standout resume is important for every field, your resume serves as a first work sample in creative marketing fields. Advertise yourself in the same way you advertise a product, brand, or service, except you are the product and your potential interviewer is your target audience.
Formatting Your Resume to Best Advertise Your Skills
Many standard resume writing best practices apply to every field. Utilizing a chronological format and maintaining awareness of your experience and the correlation to either a one-page or two-page document is standard across all industries.
Similar to standard resumes, it’s important to maintain minimal design formatting even for a creative field. Recruiters typically spend very little time reviewing your resume, so ensuring it can be read without distraction is a crucial element to a successful document. Additionally, graphic elements and asymmetrical formatting can disrupt ATS performance, as such systems aren’t able to decipher them.
Finally, be sure to include relevant links to your resume depending on relevancy. While a LinkedIn profile isn’t necessary to include directly on your resume, your online portfolio or personal website is. A hyperlink will disrupt ATS scanning, but simply listing your URL and removing the hyperlink will maintain technical best practices while still displaying essential information to hiring teams.
Tailoring Your Message
From a content standpoint, be sure to highlight professional projects and standout achievements. For those new to advertising, highlight those relevant coursework, projects, or even cross-functional skills that can be applied to the field. Hiring teams are intent on identifying candidates who take initiative in projects, complete those projects efficiently, and think creatively. Those particular skills can be demonstrated in many non-marketing related positions, allowing a strong pivot to creative and advertising roles.
Identifying and including relevant keywords is an essential part of truly catering your professional narrative. These keywords you can incorporate into bullet points or include in a skills section, both avenues allowing your document to appeal to ATS criteria and the eyes of recruiters and hiring teams.
In identifying keywords, start first with job descriptions to positions you would either consider applying for, or are aligned to such positions. The key skills and proficiencies are mentioned and oftentimes listed on job descriptions. Taking note of these key words and phrases to incorporate into your experience will elevate your performance both technically and personally within the screening process. These keywords are profoundly important in for incorporation into your professional summary. Your summary often serves as the first, and sometimes the only, place a recruiter will look at your resume. Ensuring you have included these key words and phrases for recruiter eyes will elevate your resume’s performance and open additional opportunities for first-round interviews.
While advertising resumes follow many standard best practices, incorporating both soft and hard skills alongside project and achievement-based bullets will position your document for success.