Getting Hired + Tips To Build Your Portfolio | The Copywriter's Club

Welcome to The Copywriter’s Club - a space for copywriters, by copywriters. Each week, we speak about one issue every copywriter will face at some point in their career. Today's session was about getting hired and tips to build your resume and portfolio.

I spoke with Gowri N Kishore (Ex-Creative Lead at Urban Ladder), Shikha Gupta (Head of the in-house creative team at Swiggy) and Aina Barker (Content Head at Licious) and we chatted about the hundreds of resumes we've gone through over the years, the things that really stand out to us and the tiniest mistakes that could send your resume and portfolio straight to the reject pile.

Here are some of the top tips from the session:

PHASE 1: BUILDING YOUR RESUME

Things we look for in a resume:

1. An original voice. Your resume is your first impression. As a writer, it is the perfect place for you to show off your voice. Too many copywriters make the mistake of copy-pasting generic resume templates from the internet. Trust us, we can tell. Be authentic. If your resume says things like "Seeking a mutually-beneficial copywriting opportunity to put my creative writing and grammar skills to work.", our advise to you is to drop it and write something authentic instead. Tell us what you're good at, what your niche is or what you're looking to do at this point in your career.
2. A clean layout. A hiring manager isn't going to spend more than a few minutes glancing through your resume. Make sure it's easy to skim through and clearly informs them what you do. For instance, instead of writing "I wrote copy for X brand's social media.", try adding more value with "Worked on content strategy for X brand's social media and drove X% increase in engagement."
3. Link to your portfolio. Let's be honest here. When you're a writer, your work is more important than your resume. So let it speak for itself. Don't wait for a hiring manager to ask for your portfolio. They don't have the time. They might even just ditch your resume if they can't find your work. Make sure you add a link to your resume in a prominent place, so they can easily find it. Sometimes we like to go through your portfolio first and if your works stands out, we'll come back to your resume to check if you have the relevant experience for the job.

Things that are a turn off in a resume:

1. Grammatical errors & typos. There's no excuse for incorrect grammar and spelling errors on your resume when you're a writer. This is at the very least the most basic requirement for being a writer. Errors and typos tell us that your attention to detail is shoddy and your copy checking skills are nonexistent. To make absolutely sure your resume is free from errors, get a friend to copy check it.
2. Unnecessary jargon. Don't confuse the hiring manager with words like hacker, ninja or other random jargon. Say things as they are. That said, we do appreciate creativity in a resume and if you'd like to write yours as a brochure, go for it. But keep in mind who will see your resume first - if a recruiter doesn't get what you're doing, they might not pass it on to the creative head in the first place. So just beware.
3. Overly complicated resumes. Like we said before, we're not going to spend more than a few minutes on your resume. So if we need to spend time navigating through a bunch of complicated pages to find the information we're looking for, we might just dump it.

Pro-tip: Think of your cover letter, resume and portfolio as a set. They need to work well together to make the best impact.

Audience question: Do educational qualifications matter in the resume of a copywriter?

Answer: Not really. Educational qualifications are a usually just a hygiene check mark for HR. So you should definitely add them to your resume, even if they're right at the bottom. For a creative role, your MBA degree (or lack of one) isn't going to mean squat. Your work is what we're going to look at, whether you're just starting out or have been around for a decade - that's all that really matters to the hiring manager.

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PHASE 2: BUILDING YOUR PORTFOLIO

What is a portfolio & how to start building one?

A portfolio is what you believe is your best work. It is not a dump of everything you have written since high school.

If you're an experienced writer, include your best work in your portfolio and make sure that at least a couple of the pieces are fairly recent - created in the last year or so.

If you're a newbie, and have no published work, do spec pieces. Pick a brand you love and write a film for them or create a social media campaign. Think up a campaign idea and show how you'd execute it across different channels. Write perspective pieces related to the field you're interested in, personal essays, or 'samples' you would submit. Don't wait for projects to fall into your lap to start writing.

Pro tip: Your portfolio can be a mix of actual published work and mock work, just be truthful about which is which.?

How to make sure your portfolio stands out?

1. Build an easy-to-review portfolio. Try Behance if you're just starting out, or better yet build a website using Wordpress. Don't send WeTransfer links or Google Drive links. No one's going to bother with them. And heavy PDFs are usually blocked by IT, so they'll never get through.
2. Edit your portfolio frequently. Put your best work first - in the first page/fold. Make sure you have recent pieces in there as well. You should be able to objectively cut out pieces that aren't that great any more, but if you're unsure, have a senior writer you trust review it for you.
3. Highlight your best work in your resume. Depending on the role you're applying for, mention a couple of your best, relevant pieces in your resume or cover letter and link them to your full portfolio. This way, the hiring manager can just look at the relevant pieces in your folio and not have to search through it.
4. Choose pieces that show range. Even if you're being hired for a particular role, we like to see your ability to write for different media or use different skills. So showcase that in your portfolio. Organise it with tags and categories by channel and that will help you showcase what you need to when you need it.

Is your portfolio giving enough context?

One mistake we tend to make with portfolios is just dumping final creatives or articles on it without any context. Sure, a hiring manager can tell that you're a good writer by looking through the creatives but we don’t know if it meets the brief. We don’t know if it drove any results. It is important to give some sort of context in your portfolio and here are a few ways you could.

Tell us the brief in a nutshell. No, we don't need the full 5-pager on your portfolio, but tell us in a couple of lines what the piece was meant to do/achieve, and then tell us if it did. You could even write a bit about your process or the insight that drove your idea.

Numbers are important. In a world where most of us are digital writers, everything you write can be measured. Seeing a great piece of work without knowing what result it delivered makes it just a pretty piece of writing, not a hardworking asset. Writers can no longer be just ‘creative’ you must measure that creativity. So for instance, if you're showcasing an emailer campaign, put down the open rates and engagement it drove. If you don't have the exact numbers, try and put down the qualitative metrics. E.g. if your piece doubled engagement - that's good too. Bonus: This also tells a hiring manager that you're not just a writer, and that you understand what objective your writing is meant to achieve.

What if the numbers aren't great but I'm still proud of the piece?

Doesn't matter. We know that performance of a piece is impacted by more than just the copy. Put the numbers there so we know you understand them. We will still evaluate you on the writing. Having the numbers there is just a bonus.

Pro tip: Make it a practice through your career to get the performance numbers for everything you write - and especially so for the pieces you're most proud of. Put these numbers in your portfolio.

Audience question: What do I do if my portfolio isn't the best looking? I have mostly only worked on conversion copy and GDNs etc. don't really make for good-looking creatives.

Answer: One thing you need to remember is that no hiring manager is judging a copywriter's portfolio based on how pretty it looks. That said, if you're unhappy with the way your portfolio looks because you've only got published work of one kind, you could team up with an art partner and work on some spec work covering the kinds of jobs you'd like to do. If you aren't able to find an art partner to work with, try making simple mocks on Canva or just make your own scribbles on a sheet of paper. We just need to see how well you're able to communicate your idea, the actual execution of it doesn't matter.

Side note on spec pieces - while it's fine for you to have them on your portfolio when you're starting out, as you move up to more senior positions where you're given the opportunity to influence decisions, have too many spec pieces on your portfolio could tell a hiring manager that you don't know how to sell your work. So be careful with spec work as you move up.

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PHASE 3: GET YOUR FOOT IN THE DOOR & MAKE AN IMPACT

Let’s talk about the hiring process. Today, things have gotten easier with LinkedIn and numerous job portals, but here are a few top tips from us about how you can make sure you stand out so that you can get your foot in the door and make an impact.

• Follow directions. If someone asks you to apply via a link, do that; don’t DM. If someone asks to write to an email ID, do that; don’t DM. If you must DM, be patient. Don’t pester. Most hiring managers get hundreds of applications. They may not have the time to respond to everyone. They’re busy, not snobs.?
• Share your work frequently so that when there is an opportunity, HMs reach out to you - not the other way round.
• One size doesn't fit everyone. Don't send the same portfolio link to every prospective employers: handpick pieces that are relevant for the role and say why in your cover letter.
• Do your research. If you didn’t make the effort to do a deep study about the company and its products it is an instant indicator of your attitude to the job. It indicates that you are not truly interested and just want to coast by.
• Prepare a list of questions. A job interview is a two-way street, don’t you want to know more about the role? The team? The org culture? The business plan? Your manager? Not asking questions indicates that you only want to do a very prescribed formatted role, that you don’t have any inclination to the business as a whole or anything else.

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I hope these tips help you build a better resume and portfolio going forward. If you have more questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

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