Introduction

Chapter 6: Tailoring Job Materials provides an overview of how you can use the rhetorical analysis skills you already have to create personalized, tailored job documents that help you put your best foot forward on the job search. It’s important to think about this because when you apply for a position, you are one of many candidates – to have the best chance at moving to the interview stage, you should think carefully about how your documents portray you as a professional. In the first section, you will learn how projecting a professional persona is, by and large, a product of good audience analysis during your planning, drafting, and revision stages. Then, you’ll learn specific steps to take when you are doing research to decide how to tailor your career documents. Afterwards, you’ll learn about the PARC document design principles for résumés and cover letters: Proximity, Alignment, Repetition, and Contrast. Finally, the chapter closes with tips about establishing a personal brand through your materials and online presence. You can use this chapter as you work through Project 2: Career Documents, especially if you are creating documents that you plan to submit to a real job application.

Tailoring: The Art of Audience Analysis

In the Project 2: Career Documents section, you learned briefly about the professional persona and why it is important to develop this aspect of your personality in your job materials. In this chapter, you will learn more about why you should take time to tailor materials for every job application you submit. You’ll also learn and practice technical writing principles and skills that you can use to improve your materials every time you apply to a job.

As you read in Chapter 3, it’s common for job-seekers to have base documents (usually a résumé and cover letter, though you might also create a separate references document to send upon request). These documents serve as the starting point for an individual job application, but the work doesn’t stop there. As Peterson indicates, you must find information about the job requirements, the organization for whom you hope to work, and, as in all technical writing genres, you must research your audience.

Technical writing is an audience-centered subdiscipline of writing studies. This means that all technical writing projects attempt to factor in their audience from the beginning of the planning process all the way through the end of the project. Technical writers research their audiences at the outset of a project (one example is localization, or researching the local area where a document will be deployed in order to better understand the audience who will use that document). Further, technical writing often involves testing – think of a set of instructions for heavy machinery, which will need to be tested before it is released to workers because if the instructions aren’t clear, someone could get hurt. Finally, technical writers consider their audience during revisions, changing their documents to better communicate a clear message to a specific audience.

However, job application materials have a different kind of audience than, say, the audience for a car stereo user manual. One way technical writers analyze their audiences is through eye tracking studies. According to The Ladders, a career advisory organization at Boston University, eye tracking is “a technologically advanced assessment of eye movement that records and analyzes where and how long a person focuses when digesting information or completing activities.” Reporting on an eye-tracking study of job recruiters^[1], The Ladders reported that “recruiters spent almost 80% of their resume review time on the following data points: name; current title/company; previous title/company; previous position start and end dates; current position start and end date; and education.” Will Evans, the study’s author, found a surprising figure: “recruiters spent about 6 seconds on their initial “fit/no fit” decision.” In other words, recruiters decide very quickly whether or not a candidate looks like a good fit for a job. If your documents don’t grab the recruiter’s attention, you may never get your foot in the door.

What does that mean for you, as a job candidate? Evans has a few key takeaways:

• Recruiters ranked highest job documents with good organization and clear visual hierarchy.
• Recruiters experienced higher cognitive load^[2] with documents they perceived as poorly organized.
• Recruiters became distracted by job documents with too many visual elements.

With some careful thinking and knowledge of basic design principles (which you’ll learn about below) you can use this information to your advantage to produce job documents that grab recruiters’ attention for all the right reasons.

Below, you’ll find a list of audience analysis questions you might ask in the process of tailoring your Career Documents project.

Once you’ve thought about who your audience is and what they need from you in order to receive a clear message and a detailed picture of you as a job candidate, you can move into the tailoring process. In the next section, you’ll find an overview of specific tailoring steps to take when applying to a job.

Tailoring Your Materials: A Process Overview

This section will walk you through the steps a job-seeker might take when thinking about how to tailor job application materials. As Peterson indicated in Chapter 3, the best way to start tailoring your materials is by gaining a clear understanding of the job ad itself. However, you shouldn’t stop there. You don’t just need information about this particular job position – you’ll also need to know about the company to which you’re applying and to whom you’re speaking when you write your documents. It may also be helpful to look at example career documents from other candidates in your field to decide how you want to organize and present your own materials.

How to Use Job Ads

As Katrina Peterson wrote in Chapter 3, the first place you start when you are tailoring application materials is the job ad for the position to which you are applying. It’s important to have a copy of the job ad’s exact wording, since that is your best set of clues about what the organization wants from a job candidate. As Peterson mentions, however, a company often takes a job posting down after a certain period of time. That means that if you want a copy of the exact wording, you should copy it as soon as you decide you are applying to the position. You can copy and paste it into a new document, use the “print” feature on a web browser (which you can use to print the document or to save it as a PDF), or save screenshots.

Once you have a copy of the job ad, you are ready for the next step: annotating the job ad. Much like you’d annotate a source you plan to use in a document, annotating a job ad helps you highlight the most important information so that you can respond to it. The strategies below will help you to annotate your ad.

Before you can begin composing your job application materials,  you will want to know a little bit more about the audience you are attempting to persuade. The basic information you gather from the job ad will serve as a jumping off point for further research.

How to Research a Company or Organization

The job advertisement provides enough information for you to derive an understanding of the position and its requirements. You may learn some information about the company itself from a job ad, but the more information you have about your audience, the better you will be able to understand how to communicate with them in your application materials. Use the questions below to help you dig deeper.

The questions above will help you dig much deeper into the organization to which you’ll send your documents. This will give you a clearer sense of your audience and more information to include in your materials. It is important not only to show your audience that you are qualified for the job – they also want to know that you’ve done your research on the organization and understand how you might fit within it as an employee.

How to Research Documents in Your Field

Finally, before you start working on your own materials, it can be very helpful to look at other job-seekers’ materials. In doing so, it’s important to know that career documents vary based on field. For example, a software engineer’s résumé will look different from a nurse’s résumé and both of these documents will look different from a graphic designer’s résumé. Not only will the information vary, so will the order in which that information is presented, and the document design used to convey it. A graphic designer’s résumé needs to show an understanding of clean, attractive document design, while a software engineer’s or nurse’s résumé will focus on showing qualifications, education, and experience. Luckily, many of these documents are digitized and easily available to us; the strategies and questions below will help you find them.

Once you have this information in hand, you’re ready to start creating your own documents. This means not only creating the text, but also using thoughtful document design principles to match your documents with your professional persona. Next, we’ll discuss some basic document design concepts that will help you to think about not only what your documents say, but how they are organized and how they appear to the reader. Both the written text and document design are rhetorical; that is to say, both the text and design of a document act persuasively on your audience.

Beginner Document Design Principles

Document design is tricky: when a document is designed well, we may hardly notice the design elements a writer uses to guide us through the text and emphasize important messages. When a document is designed poorly, however, we might miss the point, become confused, or stop reading altogether. Document design, then, is an incredibly important piece of your relationship (as the writer) with your audience.

To think about document design, we’ll start with the PARC design principles: proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast.^[3]

Proximity

Proximity governs how we group related elements in a document. For example, writers tend to place a caption directly under the photo it describes or explains. Readers assume that, since the caption text is right beneath the photo, it gives more information about the photo’s contents. Using proximity thoughtfully “helps organize information” and “gives the reader a clear structure” (Robin Williams, 2004).

To use proximity in your document designs, you should group related items together. These items should be physically close to one another on the page so your audience can view them together, as a cohesive unit. In other words, the placement of elements on your page should give the reader helpful information about the organization of your document. Readers should know where to start reading and have a clear idea of when they’re done. Further, they should understand clearly which items are related, and which aren’t. As Williams (2004) wrote, “[t]he closeness or lack of closeness indicates the relationship” (p. 21) – if items are close to one another, readers interpret them as related and if they aren’t, readers interpret them as unrelated.

Alignment

Alignment is a way to think about how we place items on a page and how that placement creates visual connections with other elements on the page. If a writer centers an image on the page, the audience’s eyes are drawn towards the center of the page and the information the image contains. The image and its caption create a visual unit, which readers interpret as belonging together. In other words, as Williams (2004) said, “[e]very item should have a visual connection with something else on the page” (p. 31).

To start with, you can consider three different types of alignments for your document:

1. Left-aligned: text that lines up along the left margin of the page. Left-aligned text is common in documents written in languages that we read left-to-right, such as English. Because the text lines up against the same margin on the left, it is easier for our eyes to follow the text without getting confused.
2. Right-aligned: text that lines up along the right margin of the page. Right-aligned text has some of the same advantages as left-aligned text: it creates a hard edge on the right side of the page so that your reader can very clearly see the text alignment. It may be slightly more difficult for readers who usually read left-to-right to read right-aligned text, since that edge occurs on the right side of the page.
3. Centered: text aligned to the center of the page. Centered text creates a soft edge – since it runs down the center of the page, the amount of white space on either side of the words differs.

As always, consider your audience when you make these document design choices. What information do you need the audience to understand from your document? How can you use alignment to make sure they see that information and receive your message?

Repetition

Repetition utilizes the human ability to recognize and interpret patterns to visually organize a document. The headings in this chapter are a prime example: they repeat the same font and size to draw your eye to the topic of the text that follows. Repeating this pattern consistently throughout the chapter helps readers understand the overall organization of a document.

You might think of repetition as consistency. That is, repetition shows readers that each page is part of the same document; this, in turn, increases your document’s readability. Most of us already use repetition without thinking. We know, for example, to use the same style of bullet points throughout a document when we create lists. We know that all the headings in a document should use the same font. Utilizing the principle of repetition effectively means becoming more conscious of these practices and using them thoughtfully to help communicate your message to the audience.

Contrast

Contrast is a tool that communicates meaning through difference. Headings also work on the principle of contrast, since they are usually bigger than the text around them. Because of this, the reader is able to better understand how to interpret the information given in the headings (usually the topic of the paragraphs to follow). Contrast can be shown in a wide variety of ways: font, font size, shape, color, line thickness, and more.

Contrast serves two important purposes: it increases visual interest on the page and, more importantly, it helps us create organizational hierarchy in a document, which in turn increases readability. Where repetition leads readers through a document using repeated design elements, contrast leads readers through a document by creating difference. The headings in this chapter also utilize contrast. Because the heading is larger than the text around it, the reader understands that the difference means something – and it does, because the heading text helps to visually introduce the reader to a change in topic.

Building a Personal Brand

As you may have guessed from reading the information about design principles above, creating a personal brand for your documents is a matter of audience awareness, what you hope to accomplish with your texts, and your own personality and style. The PARC principles can help you make these decisions with more confidence and consistency. By making intentional design choices, you present yourself as a technical communicator who is thoughtful and attentive to details – a plus in most rhetorical situations!

To use this information to build a personal brand, you will need to think about both design and content choices. Through these choices, you convey your professional persona to the audiences who interact with your materials. Remember, too, that the materials you use to convey your professional persona aren’t just your career documents. Your professional persona should also be reflected in places like your LinkedIn page, or any social media accounts to which your materials link. By thinking carefully about how you project your professional persona into the world, you can have more control over the first impression you make on your audience.

Creating Branded Materials

The choices you make when building your personal brand rely on the answers to two related questions:

1. What do materials in your field usually look like? What information do they include? In what order or format?
2. What design choices can you make to emphasize your message about yourself? What design choices can show your personality, or who you are as a candidate?

As you create your materials, you generally have two options: customizing templates and building from scratch.

Customizing Templates

Document design and creation programs and apps usually offer a wide variety of document design templates. These templates can make your life a lot easier, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience designing documents. However, other job-seekers also have access to these templates – you and another candidate might choose the same look for your documents, which defeats the purpose of thinking about branding in the first place!

This doesn’t mean you can’t use a template. It does mean that you should think carefully about how to customize the template you choose to reflect your own professional persona. To do so, you might ask questions like…

• What organization best reflects your skills and capabilities, as they relate to the position to which you want to apply?
• How can you use the visual elements in the template to emphasize the most important information in the document? Tip: eye-tracking studies suggest that the upper left-hand quadrant of a document is where many readers focus most clearly – place your most important information here!
• What choices can you make about colors for your document? What makes sense for your profession, or for the field you hope to enter? Remember: think about contrast – your reader needs to be able to clearly distinguish between the colors you use.

Building from Scratch

If you feel confident in your document design skills, you can build materials from scratch. This means starting with a blank page in a text or image editor and building your professional documents from the ground up. You’ll need to choose, and then figure out how to execute, every document design element you want to add. This approach gives you a great deal of freedom over how your documents look, but it can be intimidating to start with a blank page.

However, the advantage of creating documents from scratch is twofold. First, taking the time to build from scratch means that you can customize your documents to suit your specific needs. Second, creating your own documents means that you’ll gain skills in document design and creation that you can also apply on the job! Remember to give yourself a little extra time to work if you want to design your documents from scratch.

As you decide on design and organization elements, you might ask yourself the following questions…

• What content best highlights your qualifications and achievements as a job candidate? How can you place this content early in the document?
• What headings will you use to organize your document? How will you distinguish these headings visually so that your audience can easily see topic changes and document organization?
• What fonts will you choose? Consider readability, as well as how you can use size and emphasis (bold, italic, underline) to emphasize particular messages.
• What design elements will you use to emphasize the most important information in your document?
• What design elements will you repeat across your documents to create a sense of cohesion or unity?

As this chapter indicates, it takes time to do the work of tailoring your documents. This process requires you to do careful research not just on the job position to which you are applying, but also the company or organization you’ll be working with, and the people you may be meeting early in the hiring process. However, tailoring is also a way to show that you are an attentive, intelligent professional who takes your potential career seriously; through tailoring, you gain more thoughtful control over your first impression on an employer. Putting your time and effort into this process pays off!

Conclusion

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References

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