America's Future Foundation

Your resume is the first thing a potential employer will see. Make it tell a story that conveys information as opposed to just conveying information. Distinguish yourself by giving extra thought to the bullet points on your resume.

The best resumes show details instead of lists of responsibilities. For example, one person was involved with her sorority in college. She noted how she “coordinated a fund raising campaign that raised more than $10,000 for cancer research, breaking school records.” This really stands out, while most resumes might simply list “President, XYZ Sorority” or “Organized events through sorority.”

Potential employers want to know what you did quantitatively, when possible. If you worked at the campus bookstore, tell the reader how many customers you served, how many hours you worked, how many promotions you earned, and how many staff you managed. Highlight any special distinctions such as longest-serving campus bookstore student employee or received employee of the month award for positive attitude. These distinctions also help your potential employer to ask questions. One resume I saw stood out because it highlighted how the applicant worked his way through college with a full-time job.

Consider using the space where you list skills to highlight a story about your career and what makes you special. A list of the computer programs you can use, or that you are “skilled in research and writing” doesn’t say much, but a story about how your undergraduate research was published in a journal that only takes 1% of submissions would be much better. If you started your own business, be sure to list it and give details about what you learned.

Use the education section to tell a story. Most resumes say the college, the year, the major, and the GPA. Especially for entry-level and 1-3 years out of college, consider using this space to tell your college story. Did you receive a scholarship? Did you take special coursework? Were you a campus activist who overcame hardship and advanced liberty? The potential employer wants to know this, even if it was not a specific position.

By telling a story, I don’t mean in paragraph form. Andrea McCarthy is right when saying that whole paragraphs are too long to read. You should tell your story in the bullet points that go under each job heading. Don’t just give information – give your story.

Roger Custer is Executive Director of America’s Future Foundation

As a recruiter, I see hundreds of resumes a week, and several stand out to me for good reasons: brief yet descriptive bullet points, good use of space on the page, etc. Others catch my attention for the wrong reasons, and I don’t even want to bother reading them at all. This happens often and has prompted the creation of the following list: no pictures, no pigments, no paragraphs.

1) No pictures: A jobseeker should never include their photo on a resume. A jobseeker should never include ANY photo on their resume. I’ve seen cats, I’ve seen campaign buttons, I’ve seen a political figure’s face with a slash through it. All are completely unacceptable on a professional resume. Recruiters just want to see text. If we want to know what you look like, we’ll stalk you on Facebook or LinkedIn.

2) No pigments: Admittedly, the use of pigments here is a stretch, but I really wanted the whole alliteration thing to work out. What I really mean is, don’t include color on your resume. Do not underline sections with a bright colorful line. Do not use a colored font for your name or address block. And, I have to add, if your name happens to also be the name of a hue of color, don’t include that color all over your resume and try to make it your cute ‘thing’. Just stick to basic black font. You want my attention (or the hiring manager’s) to be on your work experience, not the crazy colors on the page.

3) No paragraphs: This usually comes up in resumes of candidates with several years of experience, but it warrants a reminder anyway. Do not write about your past responsibilities and accomplishments in paragraphs. List them in detailed but short bullet points. Recruiters hate digging through paragraphs to get to the line or two on accomplishments and tasks that matter most.

Avoid the three p’s and don’t sabotage your resume. To some readers these suggestions may seem overly simple, but they are necessary reminders for others. Recruiters and hiring managers like resumes that are concise, neat, and easy to read. No fluff, just facts. For further guidance on resume writing, talk to Emily Miller, Director of Employment Placement Services at the Leadership Institute and Matt Adkins, Job Bank Manager at The Heritage Foundation. Both are experts on resumes, so take advantage of the free critiques they offer. Nothing opens doors as fast as a well-written resume.

Andrea McCarthy is the Recruiter at Americans for Prosperity Foundation where she finds talented individuals to join the AFPF team. You can reach Andrea at amccarthy@afphq.org.

Editor’s Note: In his new column “Foundations of Liberty” at Free the Future, author D.B. Atchison profiles organizations helping to advance the movement for liberty.

Students For Liberty (SFL) has dedicated itself to the restoration of a free society by starting with the future– the youth.  Since its inception in 2008, SFL has grown from a gathering of 100 students to an organization with a presence in every continent except Antarctica, including 43 countries, and 800 student-run chapters.

SFL traces its origin to a small meeting organized by current SFL president Alexander McCobin while he was an intern at the Institute for Humane Studies.  That meeting set out to develop the best practices for student organizations that are dedicated to liberty.

They determined that a successful student organization needs to fully understand liberty in order to practice it, that students with similar ideas need to be able to contact other, like-minded individuals, and that student groups need external resources to be effective. With the help of Sloane Frost, Pin-Quan Ng, and Sam Eckman (pictured right), McCobin organized the first Students For Liberty Conference, and out of its success launched the organization Students For Liberty.

The rapid growth of SFL is atypical of most newly established organizations.  In the past year alone, they published their first book, The Economics of Freedom, distributing over 30,000 copies to student groups around the world.  Additionally, their Facebook page grew 153% to a total of 18,800 fans in the same year.  As of today, their page now has 64,970 fans showing a far greater growth rate for 2012. More statistics on growth and funding can easily be accessed in their 2010-2011 Annual Report.  From their first Students for Liberty Conference at Columbia University in 2008, which attracted 100 attendees during a blizzard, to this year, SFL has grown ten-fold with the most recent Fifth Annual International Students for Liberty Conference attracting over 1,000 students from around the world.

SFL is completely run by its student members, which gives it a one-two punch of grassroots momentum.  This unique structure also ensures that the issues SFL takes on are the issues that matter most to coming generations of students, and what will become the forefront issues as its members enter the political sphere.  As McCobin says:

By rejecting the typical top-down model of student organizing where groups are expected to take directives from the national office… we empower students to advance liberty through whatever strategies they think will be effective on their own campuses.

As a 501(c)3 educational organization, SFL provides students with resources to combat the growth of government in one of the most bureaucratic, semi-authoritarian environments in the United States- the college campus. They provide consulting services for students, as well as one-on-one services for specific, on-campus problems.  They also act as a networking group, providing students with a large umbrella of support from other students, leaders, and organizations dedicated to the philosophy of liberty.  Lastly they place resources like $500 protest grants and books at a student’s disposal.
Partnering with both the Ayn Rand Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education, SFL also provides free books to students who wish to start a pro-liberty reading group.  The available books include works by Ayn Rand, Frederic Bastiat, Ludwig Von Mises, and others.  Additionally, they offer free webinars on various topics throughout the year, allowing students from around the world to simply click and learn liberty.

In all, Students For Liberty is an organization which continuously attracts large numbers of college students each year.  They are a force that is here to stay, and a presence that will continue to grow nationally and internationally, and help guarantee a bright future for the liberty movement.SFL has taken what was once a libertarian minority in the conservative movement, given it the fresh face of youth, and, most importantly, have given the principles of the coming generation -the principles of liberty- a national voice.  SFL now has presence at both CPAC and the Clinton Global Initiative, showing that they are able and willing to take the debate across all parts of the political spectrum.

Disclaimer: D.B. Atchison is an alumni of Students For Liberty at the University of Alabama

I went to college in the dark ages when email was still fairly new (Juno was my jam) and we weren’t allowed to use the internet for research to cite in papers. At my small liberal arts university in Phoenix, I was the student body president, I studied abroad at Oxford, and graduated summa cum laude a semester early. My whole life I was an A student, and was always told I would succeed.

Then I entered the workforce. It quickly became apparent that the jobs available to me almost exclusively involved being someone’s assistant. Within six months I was driving an hour each way in Dallas, Texas to a job where I filed papers for some idiot. I was in despair. Why did I work so hard in college if this is what was waiting on the other side?

I called the Vice President of my University who had been a mentor to me and described my disillusionment. His advice: go to graduate school. Even then, ten years ago, I knew that was bad advice, however well-meaning. What’s the point of an undergraduate degree if all I qualify for is a job that I could have done after high school? And if college is useless because it didn’t give me the experience that employers want, graduate school probably would be too.

I started to transition into sales at my job at an importing firm. By inserting my ideas and being proactive, I made myself useful enough that they sent me to China for eight days to teach our counterparts there about the importing cycle so we would cut down on mistakes and miscommunication.

I got recruited out of that job to work at a wealth management firm, but that still involved too much time buried in paperwork, so six months later I packed my car and moved to DC. I saw legions of graduates with much fancier academic pedigrees than me pouring into DC and feeling the same disillusionment about what they were facing in post-college reality. I fell into this thing they called the “Libertarian Movement” and learned fundraising, which is really just sales for nonprofits so I was good at it. After doing several fundraising jobs, as well as helping to grow AFF’s Membership program in my spare time, I jumped industries again and started my own business.

Unfortunately it’s worse for recent graduates today than it was for me ten years ago. Your college degree is worth even less, was more expensive, and the job market is more paltry. If you’re despairing about what you are facing, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Figure out what you DON’T want to do. Especially as a woman, you can get tracked into administrative jobs. Even though I’m very organized and good at that stuff, I knew I didn’t want to get stuck there. I actually pretended to not be good at it so people wouldn’t give me those tasks anymore.

2. Learn what interests you and what you’re good at. School makes you good at school. Work is totally different, but you can take initiative to get on projects that interest you or create them by pitching them to your boss or manager.

3. Jump at new opportunities. I changed jobs almost every year until I was twenty-eight. New opportunities (that come to you or you seek out) help you advance and try out new challenges.

4. It doesn’t matter that you’re smart. I know you were told your whole life that you are smart, but it doesn’t matter that much anymore. More specifically, it matters how you think and solve problems, not how much Aristotle you’ve read or how great you were at writing papers. Being smart made me better at the jobs I took, but I was successful in them because I worked hard and got results.

Life after college sucks at first, but that’s the fault of college for being a weird environment with its own rules. Once you realize that and adapt outside of it, you can do great.

Joanna Robinson is the Owner of Lunar Massage, a growing chain of massage studios in Washington D.C. She is a former Membership Director and now Board Member of AFF.

Like it or not, there are certain rules to writing. These rules have emerged as a spontaneous order over centuries. In time, entrepreneurs have changed them. They have adapted the rules to accommodate new mediums such as email, cellphone texts, and Twitter feeds. And they have improved them, allowing obsolete phrases to die out and new and improved words and metaphors to abound (have you used “to Google” as a verb today?).

But for those of you with a libertarian bent and who think that subjective value reigns and that style is a matter of taste, I have bad news: you risk being misunderstood if you do not follow the rules. Remember, these rules emerged because they work.

I do not think it is useful for me to list all of the rules here. I can do no better than to simply direct you to what I believe to be the best source, William Strunck and E.B. White’s timeless The Elements of Style. You can find it in any bookstore. Read it. Keep it at your fingertips when you write. Then read it again every year or so.

Check your writing closely; little details like “dangling modifiers” and word choices can make a huge difference in meaning and clarity. Similar-sounding but differently spelled words can give even experienced writers trouble (if you don’t know what I am alluding to, maybe you have eluded this mistake).

Sometimes, words have been misused for so long that few people even know their original meaning. Have you ever referred to the enormity of something? If you have, you were saying that the thing was monstrously wicked. Hopefully, that is what you intended to convey.

Here again, the best I can do is direct you to Strunck and White. They have a helpful chapter titled “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused.”

Matt Mitchell is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center. This post is an excerpt from the Institute for Humane Studies “Creating Your Path to a Policy Career” guide.

Your reputation is very important as you climb the ladder in any industry. It is even more important in Washington, DC and the liberty movement since we know each other well and word travels quickly. One way to uphold a great reputation is to keep your word. Always do what you say, follow through on promises, and do more than expected.

Keep your word 100% of the time. If you say you are going to do something, make sure you do it. This could be as small as replying to someone’s email, or as large as quitting smoking or resolving to be on time. Email is one place where it is easy to say something and not do it. Always be careful about how you word your email when it comes to offering something. For example, if you aren’t sure if you can make an event, don’t say you “will” be there, but you will “try to” be there. If you can help with a project, say you “will” help with the project, not that you “might.”

When you schedule a meeting with someone, be sure to 1) be there early, or 2) change it more than 24 hours before if something else comes up. It is very frustrating when people cancel a lunch meeting an hour or two before, unless there is a real emergency or a sudden illness. If you anticipate too much work, decline the lunch meeting in the first place.

Recently, someone invited me to lunch and we scheduled it 2 weeks in advance. The day of the meeting, the person cancelled two hours before and we re-scheduled a week later. The person also cancelled the postponed meeting that day, two hours before the reservation. I decided not to re-schedule fearing a third postponement. Don’t be that person who disrespects the other person’s time by scheduling and cancelling without sufficient notice. Keep your word.

Go above and beyond what you promise. Definitely keep your word and deliver what you promise, but consider going above and beyond. For example, you could email a colleague and say you will help with a research project. Find a way not only to help with one aspect, but to help the whole project succeed. It could be asking your friend to also help, or maybe posting it to your social media sites to get more readers.

What do you want your reputation to be? What do you want people saying about you when you’re not there? Think about those questions and make a list of actions you can take today (and in the long term) to arrive at that reputation. Keeping your word is a great place to start.

Roger Custer is Executive Director of America’s Future Foundation

AFF-Denver chairwoman Jennifer Shirley recently led the chapter’s relaunch with an event cosponsored with the Heritage Foundation. Jennifer writes this recap:

First of all, I would like to sincerely thank the Heritage Foundation for allowing us to co-host an event focusing on the federal government’s fiscal crisis. As the re-launch platform for Denver’s AFF chapter, it was really great to meet the genuinely interested people who attended. As for our speaker, Bill Beach–Heritage’s Director of Data Analysis–presented in-depth knowledge about the fiscal crisis our country is facing. Coining the phrase “The Debt-Paying Generation,” Beach outlined the seriousness that the upcoming generation of 20- and 30-somethings face. He details this in his upcoming new book, in his soon to be released book Slay the Beast – How You Can Save US From Our Massive Debt.

Beach says, “Indeed, those of you in the Debt-Paying Generation could end up your working lives as the least-improved generation.” He goes on to say, “You will marry later, have fewer children, poorer health and lower incomes.” Beach helped to bring home the point that if the federal government continues down this path, it will have dire consequences for generations to come. The time to act is upon us and I believe that’s the message those who attended took home with them. Much thanks to Angelise Schrader and Bill Beach from Heritage for helping us to put on a successful and meaningful re-launch event. I hope members of Denver’s pro-liberty will attend our next event this summer.

To learn more about AFF-Denver and what it has planned, please contact Jennifer Shirley or join AFF-Denver’s Facebook page.

On Twitter, Nansen Malin is the most followed non-celebrity in the world – her following @nansen is just over 440 thousand people. Which probably makes her a celebrity in her own right. Living on a beach on the Pacific coast of Washington state, she says,

My social media following has given me involvement at a national level. I have a large online footprint and work with members of Congress, national campaigns, non-profits, think tanks, and consultants to push out conservative messaging. I get tips to be the first to break news.

Nansen attributes her success to her authentic style and being an early adapter to twitter, joining in April 2008. Her use of twitter to live-tweet the presidential debates led to her being named one of the original “Top Conservatives on Twitter,” known in Twitter jargon as #TCOT. In January 2010, the CBS television network asked her to live-tweet President Obama’s State of the Union address, solidifying her status as a social media powerhouse. The government once enlisted her to tweet about an earthquake in Hawaii because her feed was one of the most read sources of information quickly available.

Off the web, she serves as the Americans for Prosperity Washington State director. Locally, she is a Republican precinct committee officer, she serves on the board of directors for the oldest salmon hatchery in Washington state, and she serves on the Community Action Program Board of Directors. She is also a serial entrepreneur and currently co-owns a data processing company with her husband.

A Conversion to Conservatism.

Originally from Oregon, she first became politically involved in high school. Coming from a traditionally democratic community, it was only natural for her to seek out her local democratic party office, where she volunteered for many years.

My involvement in liberal politics had a role in my being chosen to study Saul Alinsky methods. I was chosen to attend the Saul Alinsky Institute at age 18. It was a huge honor to be chosen. One of just a few and the youngest!

The main lesson that she learned from this experience was that creating discord in a community effects change. For many years, through college and her early career, she was a dedicated student of Alinsky’s and an ardent supporter of democratic candidates.

Her worldview began to change, however, after she became a business owner. She says that a mentor of hers during this period of her life helped her realize that “as a business owner, you can’t vote for democrats and stay in business… My business experience proves that conservative values result in freedom and prosperity.” She goes on to say,

I have always known that true economic freedom would test my abilities. The DNA of America is in the blood of entrepreneurs. We are what makes America great. We employ people, buy and sell goods/services and even support government services from the taxes we (and our employees) pay.

In “full disclosure,” Nansen believes that there is room for everyone in the free market to be an entrepreneur.

I think everyone should be a business owner. You can’t find a job? Go bake pies, wash windows, make something. Sell it for profit and hire your friends. Everyone can figure out something of value they can produce or do… for money.

 It is a lot of work! Being self-employed and taking on the responsibility of a payroll is one of the hardest things you can do. It is also the most rewarding thing. Many sleepless nights and a lot of responsibility. But it is totally worth it!

 What Drives Her to be Successful.

Nansen is no doubt successful on Twitter because of her passion for social media. To her, social media is a way to “pass the torch” to younger people because it “transcends generations.”

Twitter is the kindling to push messages out, drive traffic and expose as many people as possible to true conservative ideas. Twitter is a fire hose of information.

I believe twitter should be genuine and have organic personalized responses. I use the list feature, hashtags and follow key people who have good content. I also welcome tips. I am under pressure to keep good content so I love it when people ask me to tweet out something that relates to the conservative message.

She also has plenty of practical advice for people looking to cultivate a twitter personality.

Relax, be real. Talk about your life, food, take photos, use links. Develop rapport by being approachable. Don’t pontificate or lecture. Ask questions. Have a conversation. Don’t swear either. I have had the honor of tweeting for some of the large news media… they wouldn’t have picked me if I embarrassed them with swear words. Call me old fashioned… use some manners.

She also recommends using less than the allotted 140 characters to allow for retweets and mentions. If you are looking to learn more, she recommends learning “from the best people in the industry” to “get a jump start on your peers.” She personally learned a lot from the Americans for Prosperity RightOnline conferences. If you are interested in attending the upcoming RightOnline conference on June 15&16 in Las Vegas, more information can be found here.

A Final Piece of Advice From Nansen.

For students and recent graduates who are just starting out, Nansen advises, “follow your passion.”

Don’t be afraid to take something to get in the door, pay the bills, but work on your passion. Burn the midnight oil and become self-sufficient. Ask questions, talk to people. Everyone loves to help an eager hardworking person… young or old.

To learn more about Nansen, make sure to follow her Twitter page, if you don’t already. Also, check out her fun blog about beach living – what she does when she isn’t changing the world of public policy.

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Jacqueline Otto is a commentator and writer. Her work has been published in Fox News, Investor’s Business Daily, The Daily Caller, Townhall, The Austin-American Statesman, and the American Spectator. She is regular columnist for the American Enterprise Institute’s Project on Values and Capitalism and America’s Future Foundation’s Free the Future blog. She is also a new media consultant working with the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics. Jacqueline is on Twitter at@jacque_otto.

I sometimes appeal to the clients of my local massage studios through my Facebook page or our newsletter to find people who would be interested in working at the front desk part-time. I’ve gotten some great employees this way who love what we do and want a fun evening or weekend job.

A few months ago I had a client respond by email that she was interested in starting a business one day and would love to help at Lunar Massage because she wanted to learn the ins and outs. I was super-flattered that she considered my business worth emulating and excited to have someone around who was interested in the big picture of running a business.

I don’t have a co-founder or business partner, so for three years I’ve been the only one at my company who thinks about the meta-issues. I jumped on Anne’s offer to work in exchange for massage and said I’d love to talk to her about the entrepreneurial process and bounce ideas off of her.

In just a few months, Anne had added a ton of value to Lunar Massage. We now meet outside the studio as well to work on optimizing our processes and developing new marketing strategies and management layers to the company. She’s a hard worker with lots of energy and great ideas.

Now I wish I would have done the same thing before I started. I could have easily gotten a part-time job at a massage establishment to see how the industry worked, or tried to apprentice myself to a local entrepreneur I admired. Since I didn’t, I had zero experience before I hung out my shingle. I still made it, but the first twelve months (the hardest phase of any business) were probably harder than they had to be.

Anne has not only “apprenticed” herself to me. She has a day job as a research assistant but because of her interest in starting a business someday she has worked at several other businesses on her evenings and weekends, including the local pedi-cab company. She learned how to do basic bike fixes and now teaches workshops to pedi-cabbers on how to fix a broken chain or a flat tire while they’re out on the job.

Consider apprenticing yourself to someone who has skills you want to learn. The value of your free time could be great for them, and your rubber-meets-the-road exposure could be hugely worthwhile for you. Higher education makes you good at school; it’s not good at giving you actual, marketable skills. Skip the high tuition fees and years out of the workforce and go acquire some skills yourself.

Joanna Robinson is the Owner of Lunar Massage, a growing chain of massage studios in Washington D.C. She is a former Membership Director and now Board Member of AFF.

There is a common notion—reinforced through years of procrastination—that writing is the last step. The idea is that you should think, plan, research, gather data, mull it over, and then finally write. This is backward.

As Deirdre McCloskey once put it, “The real problem is the premise that you can split content from style.” The fact of the matter is that for most people, the very act of writing helps shape their thoughts. This is because there is a mysterious connection between our brains and our hands. As we type—or better yet, handwrite — our brains are activated.

You may have noticed when you were in school that if you read over a proof or a rearrangement of an equation in a math textbook, you retained some of the information. But if you took the time to actually write out the equation on your own, something miraculous happened: You comprehended and remembered the lesson much more easily. The same is true of writing. As McCloskey put it, “You do not learn the details of an argument until writing it in detail, an d in writing the details you uncover the flaws in the fundamentals.”

So don’t plan and think and ponder. Write.

And write early. Don’t wait until the last minute. Start building an outline as early as possible. This will help you understand where you need to do more work, gather more data, or rethink your premise. As James Buchanan used to tell his graduate students, the key to successful writing is to “apply ass to chair.” You can take breaks every so often (within reason). Try going for a walk or getting a cup of coffee.

Psychologists have found that the brain actually works much better when people subconsciously process a question for some time (Smith). But return to the chair and write. As you do this more often, I promise that it will become less painful.

References

Deirdre McCloskey, Economical Writing (Prospect Heights, Ill: Waveland Press, 2000).

Stephen Smith, “Getting Into and Out of Mental Ruts: A Theory of Fixation, Incubation, and Insight,” in R.J. Sternberg and J.E. Davidson, eds, The Nature of Insight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).

Matt Mitchell is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center. This post is an excerpt from the IHS “Creating Your Path to a Policy Career” guide.