The Communication Job Search Handbook, 2017 Edition

By Stephen Winzenburg

The technological revolution has led to an increase in careers in the communication industry. Creative and energetic college graduates are looking for work in video, event planning, journalism, radio, TV, photography, newspapers, sports broadcasting, social media, and graphic design. This is the first book to take communication and media students through the steps to get a job in the field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365137594

Book preview

The Communication Job Search Handbook, 2017 Edition

The Communication

Job Search Handbook

2017 edition

Stephen Winzenburg

Copyright 2012, 2017 by Stephen Winzenburg

Media Memories Publishing

All Rights Reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted by electronic, digital, recorded or photocopied means without the prior written permission of the author.

All illustrations and images are the property of their individual copyright owners.

Original ISBN 0-9740452-7-6

Library of Congress Control Number:  2010933839

This ebook contains all of the material from the print edition, with the exception of some photo illustrations. There may be some numeric or formatic changes in the transition to ebook format.

INTRODUCTION

You are living in an era when the communication field is one of the most popular career choices for college students. A large number of creative and energetic people that were raised with technology are now looking for work in graphic design, event planning, digital editing, social media writing, photography, video producing, webcasting, magazines, music mixing, media relations, and advertising.

Based on the last year that government statistics are available, there were 1.8 million bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States. Over 88,750 of those were in communication and journalism. And over 55,000 are female, which means two-thirds of those trying to get into the communication business are women. The total number is up 25% from ten years earlier but there’s a negative side: there aren’t 88,000 jobs available in the communication field each year. So the competition for job openings is tough.

Another 9,500 earned master’s degrees in communication or related fields, and 567 achieved Ph.D.’s. So almost 99,000 students recently graduated from educational institutions looking for communication careers.

Hunting for a job in communications is different from looking for work in other industries. Unlike nursing or business, where the fundamentals are mostly the same no matter what type of corporation you work for, the communication field is made up of often-unrelated areas that require unique skills. A television photographer has almost nothing in common with a magazine graphic designer, but both are considered communication workers.

Here is how the Digest of Education Statistics lists the fields of bachelor degree communication graduates, based on the latest number available:

Be careful in reading too much into the smaller numbers for some fields. For example, Sports Communication has only 13 graduates, but that means few schools offer that specific degree and those getting jobs in sports media graduate with a more broadly-titled major such as broadcasting or communication studies.

There are a lot of traditionally-titled degrees that have less specific meaning in today’s media world. What background does a Journalism major have? It certainly is no longer just print reporting—and due to recent cuts in print publications those jobs are more difficult to acquire. Mass Communication, Media Studies, Speech Communication, and even things like Radio & TV or Advertising no longer describe training in one narrow area. Colleges have adapted to the converged media environment by requiring students to learn a broad base of skills.

That is why this book is necessary. There are plenty of workbooks and websites that give the general job seeker advice on how to prepare a resume, answer questions in an interview and locate a position. But no other book specifically focuses on how to get a job in the communication industry.

The only publications on the market geared toward communication careers are those that talk about the potential media choices for students that are selecting a college major. Instead of giving specifics about how to find work, those books are meant for readers who are deciding what to major in.

This book is different—it assumes you have already chosen the communication field and been trained in an aspect of it.  Now you are preparing to look for work in your specialization and need help.

You have chosen to search for a job during a growing recovery from one of the most difficult economic times in recent history.  The recession that started in 2008 caused hiring freezes and lay-offs, leading to increased unemployment. So while the number of communication graduates increased, the number of positions available dramatically declined.

At one major daily newspaper everyone on staff was told they would be let go and would need to reapply for jobs. Many never returned. The NiemanLab calls it, The halving of America’s daily newsroom, showing that print journalism jobs went from 57,000 in 2008 to 33,000 in 2015. That shocking decline also meant fewer opportunities for minorities, which now make up only 13% of print journalists.

While many parts of the business world have shown recovery since the recession, the communication industry was slower to begin hiring again. Thousands were laid off and many of those have failed to find full-time media work. So when there is a job opening, instead of just a couple dozen applicants, now a couple hundred people compete for a single position. Many of those that you will be competing against are over-qualified for entry-level jobs.

When our department hired a new secretary, which is a nine-month position with a low hourly wage, I stopped counting after the applicant list got to 130.  For a job that required only secretarial skills with no formal education, many applicants had bachelor’s degrees, three had master’s degrees, and one applicant had a doctorate!

I hired a part-time, 20-hour-a-week radio station operator that was paid $12 an hour. The 50 applicants included three with current major media jobs, a former TV sports anchor in the area, three applicants with master’s degrees, one with a doctorate, and one with a law degree. Why? The job came with benefits and many of them, even if they were currently employed, didn’t have affordable health care coverage.

What that means to you is that the job market is filled with over-qualified people looking for work. They are the ones you are competing against and you need an edge to get noticed.  This book will help you do that by not following the traditional method that everyone else uses to try to get a job, coaching you in unique ways to secure a communication position.

Since there are fewer jobs available, seekers have to expand the type of work they are willing to apply for. Even if your education may have been somewhat narrow, your search must be relatively broad.

One of my recent graduates, who was trained in video production and worked part-time during college at a local television station, got her first full-time job as a newspaper graphic designer. After she reorganized her resume to emphasize her graphic skills, the paper called her the day before graduation, conducted a two-hour in-person interview then had her design sample ads in front of them, and within a week of getting her degree was offered the job. She wrote, To tell you the truth I didn’t think I would get a job so fast! And I believe that your career seminar really did help me out a lot in getting it.

Another student who majored in public relations and wanted to go into event planning had to take the only job that was offered to her, which was in magazine sales. One guy who was a graphic journalist took a position as a TV sports writer. Then there was the newspaper writer who needed good benefits so she took a desk job with an insurance company.

A photography graduate was hired full-time by a car dealer to take pictures for the company’s newspaper ads (hey, somebody has to do it!). A public relations major with no broadcasting background became a radio traffic reporter just because she had a friend who worked at the station. And a broadcasting major ended up as an admissions counselor at a private college after being forced to stand up and give a five-minute speech during his job interview. He later wrote, I must admit there were days in class when I said to myself ‘Come on, this isn’t going to happen.’ Well, consider me humbled and glad you made us go out of our comfort zone.

The workplace is looking to hire people with a variety of skills while the job market is filled with narrow-minded graduates who are limiting their searches.  This book will help you think outside the box that you may have placed yourself in to give you an advantage over others.

It can be difficult to stand out from the competition, especially in the initial stages of the job search. Many employers now only want resumes submitted via email or require materials to be electronically uploaded at the company’s human resources site. Samples of work are expected to be available electronically and a personal business website is a must for graduates to promote themselves online.

The reverse side of these exciting changes is that the Internet and social media are now used by potential employers to weed out applicants. Those hiring do a simple Google search of your name or email address or handle, check you out on Facebook or Instagram, and even look for your party images tagged on others’ sites. They can easily uncover your arrests or bad driving history with instant online access to almost all of your public records.

Applicants are rejected before getting a chance to talk to the company if something negative shows up online. And you may never be aware of it. You submit your resume and never hear back, not knowing that it may be because they searched you online and found a compromising photo or an embarrassing tweet.

If you are serious about getting a job, from this moment on everything you do online needs to be geared toward how it could impact your search. No more posting those photos of you and your pals drinking or using illegal substances. No more writing snarky comments that could be considered offensive, even if meant in jest. No more online bragging that you can’t back up, such as claiming that you spent the summer working for CBS when you simply volunteered to help pass out plastic bags for the local CBS station at the State Fair.

I have had students swear that no unauthorized outsider will be able to get access to their private pages—and a few minutes later I have called up incriminating photos. I shocked one guy in the career class when I walked in asking about an Internet picture of him drinking at a weekend party in Minnesota. He got red faced and asked how I got access to his private Facebook page. He’ll never know. Some companies employ IT people who know the tricks to legally find ways to view private pages.

Anything you do online could potentially cost you a job. Sportscaster Damian Goddard was fired after supporting traditional marriage on his private Twitter account. A Houston Chronicle reporter was fired after it was discovered he was writing a private blog under a fake name that slammed local officials. Comedian Gilbert Gottfried discovered that a simple joke he made on Twitter about the Japan tsunami cost him his lucrative position as the voice of the Aflac duck.

After one new college grad was interviewed by a leading company, it was ready to hire her but did a quick social media check before the offer was made. What the company found was the young woman’s Pinterest page had a photo of sexy lingerie that she liked. She wasn’t wearing it, she didn’t comment on it, she just pinned it. And they refused to hire her.

A Tampa TV reporter and her station photographer, who happened to be engaged, posted a fun happy birthday video saying that another newswoman was one of Tiger Woods’ mistresses. After seeing it on Facebook and YouTube the boss fired the couple.

You may not think any of that is fair but the working world isn’t always fair. Neither is the job search process fair—you may have the best experience and meet all the qualifications but receive no responses to your resume because of what potential employers discover about you online. Don’t be the 22-year-old who tweeted that she just turned down a job because she’d hate to work too much—which made future employers reject her as soon as they did a basic online search.

Or ponder the story of Nicole Crowther, a 21-year-old student at the Los Angeles Film Academy who appeared as an extra on Glee, but then tweeted a spoiler to the end of the show’s second season. One producer tweeted back, Hope you’re qualified to do something besides work in entertainment. She went from being on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon actress before Glee to being virtually unhireable in the business. Five years later she told ABC News that the single tweet ruined my life.

One of the most important aspects of hiring that a graduate needs to accept is that the job search process is discriminatory. It has to be. Out of 150 applicants, the company has to discriminate against 149 in order to select the one that is hired. At times that means better qualified applicants will be rejected based on a quirk while less qualified people are hired based on factors other than their abilities.

We tend to think of the word discriminatory in its negative use, as an unfair denial of rights to someone based on prejudice. But one of the definitions of the term is the power to distinguish. All job searches attempt to distinguish between candidates in order to select the best.

So part of playing this job search game is accepting the fact that one person wins and everyone else loses. For every position you apply for, an employer uses its power to distinguish to decide who they feel is best. It is discriminatory.

That shouldn’t keep you from searching for work—it should propel you to work harder to try to win! Athletes know that only one person or team can win a competition—that doesn’t keep them from playing. It motivates them to work harder, learn from mistakes, focus on the areas they are strongest in and listen to advice from coaches to improve their chances.

You are discriminatory when you date. You go through potential mate after potential mate, trying to figure out who is worth sticking with. When you are in that getting to know you phase, you ask questions, check out how the person dresses, see how they treat others, judge how they talk, decide if you feel a connection—all a process of discrimination to make sure you don’t get stuck with a loser.

The workplace is also discriminatory. Those that act the right way get promoted, while those that don’t follow the company rules get stuck in a dead-end job or fired. People that dress the role get raises while those that come to work in cut-offs and flip flips may get a negative evaluation and no pay raise. Although no one may ever say, You didn’t get the promotion because you look like you just got out of bed, spend too much time on your cell phone, and use too many profanities, those could very well be the reasons. That is all discriminatory.

Knowing that, your life must change in order to get and keep a job. That includes how you deal with the people you meet (see everyone as a potential networking opportunity), the way you present yourself publicly (dress nicely and avoid profanities), and your attitude toward life (it doesn’t revolve around you but is about you happily serving others).

There is no magic formula for guaranteeing you will get a job.  But there are some common sense actions you can take to improve your chances at success.  As I say on the first day of my seminar class, everything you do from this day forward involves planting seeds to start the process of growing your future. You will distribute those seeds through the materials you create to apply for work, a strong Internet presence, and networking with your contacts.

Planting seeds is mostly about networking, taking advantage of your contacts but also viewing people you meet (in person or online) as potential soil in which you can grow your future. As you tend to what you have planted, you will see those seeds thrive into a successful communication career.

The approach this book takes is that you don’t do this on your own—your chances of growing a successful career increases by learning from others. You need all the help you can get in choosing how to put together your resume and cover letter, which jobs to apply for, and how to handle yourself in the interview. Decisions that you will make are like putting building blocks one on top of the other (a concept we will discuss in detail in chapter one).

That’s why the cover of this book involves both building blocks and growth from seeds. Your job search will be a process of building your future through opportunities you have planted. The best way to start is to learn from others who did the same.

I will include stories of real students and real employees who have gone through the same things you are going through. Some names or genders have been changed and a few of the quotes have been edited for clarity, but the stories are all factual.

You will be surprised how some of the most successful people in the world have gotten their start by doing menial tasks. You will also learn that some of the best-trained, highest-educated graduates missed being hired because they had the wrong attitude or look.

My background has prepared me to give this type of advice to graduates. I have worked for three newspapers, run three college television facilities, held a variety of positions at 16 radio stations, written hundreds of articles and press releases that have been published nationally, have created websites, hired and fired others, and gone through many successful job searches. 

I’ve been hired and turned the offer down. I’ve been fired and scrambled to find work. I’ve packed up getting ready to move, only to have the deal fall through at the last minute. I’ve accepted positions that I later regretted and turned down jobs that I later wished I had taken.

Twice I was contacted by companies that wanted to hire me even though I never applied for their jobs, letting them fly me in but ultimately turning down their offers. Twice I was told I was one of two finalists for a position and that they would be back in touch to make arrangements to fly me in for an interview, only to never hear from them again.

I’ve been offered a lot of money for positions I wasn’t interested in. I’ve rejected jobs that I liked because the pay was too low.

I was flown in to meet with a billionaire network TV owner for a couple hours at a restaurant at the top of an airport hotel, only to turn down his offer mostly out of fear that the expectations and risks were too high. I had to turn down a great offer because my current employer wouldn’t release me from my contract. Another I left only four months after starting because the boss warned me that the company was getting ready to go under (and it did!).

My resume has changed often, learning from my mistakes to strengthen my chances of getting it looked at. My cover letter structure has stayed pretty much the same, where I try to make a personal connection in the final paragraph to stand out from the competition.

I’ve applied for a couple dozen jobs over the past seven years to keep myself current on the job search process. While most experts say you should expect to be interviewed by only one percent of the jobs you apply for, I have been interviewed by over half of the places where I applied. That means my resume and cover letter work.

As recently as 2014 I applied to four colleges for teaching positions. All four called and asked to interview me. Two brought me to campus as a finalist and I was offered the job at both, but turned them down due to the low pay. I also turned down the chance to interview at the other two because they called too late, after I had already re-signed a contract for my current job. I would say averaging four-for-four is a pretty successful job search.

In 2015, the day after I left meeting with multiple leaders (including the president and two small groups) a company vice president drove four hours to my house to put a contract in front of me. After I rejected the offer they kept asking but after I turned it down five times in two weeks they finally gave up. I’ve been offered 90% of the jobs I’ve interviewed for in person, which means I probably understand that part of the process pretty well as well.

During the recent period when I was being offered positions, I was also heading a search committee at my current institution and went through two different ad cycles where we filtered through dozens of candidates. Trust me when I say that almost no one knows how to write a good cover letter or resume—even those with graduate degrees. It is something that is rarely taught in depth at most educational institutions.

I have enough successful, current experience to be able to pass along advice to those of you looking for work. I’m constantly learning new tricks in the job search process and hope that you can benefit from my stories, as well as what you’ll hear from others in this book.

So the first major piece of advice I can give you is to learn from what others have gone through in the hiring process—it will save you from having to make some of their mistakes. That includes friends, parents, teachers, and those who have been successful in your field. I understand that concept may be foreign to some college seniors that want to make it their own way or cringe thinking that they should listen to preachy authority figures. You’ve been told your whole life how great you are, when in truth once you enter the job-search market you don’t look a whole lot different from anyone else. So it will save you a lot of time if you learn from others and take their advice. You may even have to change in order to establish a successful career and it’s easier to learn those things from observing others than having to go through them yourself.

This will require you to get outside yourself and accept that you don’t know everything. When you are a young adult who has lived off your parents and been smiled at by teachers your whole life, you think everyone likes you and will want to hire you. You’ve taken the classes, participated in activities, had the internship, and now think the world is ready for you. What else could you possibly need to learn?

But there is a lot more that goes into the hiring process than a person with minimal qualifications being picked for the position. It isn’t a customer transaction where any person who fills out the proper paperwork and pays the money for a degree automatically gets a job. Starting your career involves more than just having a good resume or the proper cover letter.

Professor Stephen Prothero wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that your college education has two aspects to it. One provides the tools you need to enter a profession, while the other involves maturing your thinking skills to deal with the bigger questions of life.

Every year I tell my Boston University undergraduates that there are two worthy pursuits for college students. One is pre-professional: preparing for a career that will put food on the table and a roof overhead. The other is more personal: finding big questions worth asking, which is to say, questions that cannot be answered in one lecture, one semester or even a lifetime. What is my purpose in life? What will happen to me when I die? How do things come into being? How do they cease to be?

Both aspects raised by Prothero have to be dealt with in order to have a successful future. This book will help you pull together all you have learned in your pre-professional communication program to help you get the job you have trained for, but it will also raise some of the maturity issues that you will deal with long after you leave college. The best way for you to start the job search process is to acknowledge that there is something greater than you in life, and that you are not the center of the universe.

It’s about having an accurate sense of your place in the world, articulating your life goals and having a realistic timeline to get to those goals. It’s about having an attitude that reflects a willingness to work harder than anyone else to do the tasks no one else wants to do in order to get where you eventually want to go.

The bottom line is that this book, like the career class I teach, is not just about the job acquisition process but is about having success in life. That has to do with going into the working world with the proper attitude in order to build a fulfilling career.

Sometimes it takes awhile for graduating students to realize that they no longer can show up late in sloppy clothes, distracted by text messages and thinking about after-work socializing.  From this moment on, if you want to be a success you need to show up early while looking professional and giving your full attention to each work task. (That, by the way, starts with the classes you are still in right now.)

A friend at a local department store told of a new employee that was late seven times in his first 10 days of work and was fired during his third week on the job. My nephew showed up late on his first day of work and was giving a warning. When he did it again on the second day he was fired. Typical of this generation, if you Google search fired for showing up late you find a slew of complainers saying that they were given no warning or no notice. Hey—here’s the notice: when you accept any job you are accepting their requirement for you to show up at a specific time, so be there or be fired. You have no right to complain—they are paying you to be there on time!

Maybe you have teachers, employers at part-time jobs, or family members that let you get away with it. Employers won’t. Oh, they might not say anything to you at first but they’re watching you and writing it all down. You’re not a superstar athlete that just gets fined thousands for being late or a management-level employee that can be more flexible with your hours. Before you know it you’ll be gone. Or you’ll be complaining that you don’t get promoted, yet you haven’t respected the system by showing up on time and working harder than everyone else to get that promotion.

Some of these attitude changes won’t be comfortable at first and there may be times you don’t like the advice you hear. But students that have taken these suggestions seriously have later written to me about how the concepts have impacted their lives:

Amy, a public relations specialist, wrote, "This has forced me to accept things I didn’t want to think about. Things I never considered weaknesses I now know I have to work on. But I also realized I possess skills I never thought of as skills that some of my peers don’t…I do know how to function in a workplace."

Ashley, who went on to work for an advertising company in Los Angeles, wrote, "When you told us you were going to be honest and we may not be comfortable with you, my first thought was, ‘good, this is what I need.’ It made me eager to find out what I could work on to make myself that much better and try to make myself stand out so I could actually get a job after graduation…I realized that in life asking for help does not make you a failure."

Dani, a public relations writer, said, The major thing I learned about in class that I saw translated best was to work hard for what you want, even if it involves things you may not enjoy.

Josh, a local morning radio producer, wrote, "I can’t believe I am saying this but I love waking up at 4:30 to produce the morning show…So much you have told me is so true."

Tiffany is now a photographer and concluded, The class helped me realize that it’s not enough to just have good materials but that you have to be able to charm the interviewers and make your personality stand out so that you are memorable.

Ryan, a television production assistant, said the