The current economic state has leveled the playing field, so to speak. I’ve written before about how this climate has created more empathy for the freelance-lifestyle-loving artists (and, from those who aren’t empathetic, a sense of sheer panic), but actors almost always need some sort of survival job in order to support their creative careers. Marie Watkins is not only an expert at the “real world” of job hunting, she’s also the parent of a young actor who contributed to the third edition of Self-Management for Actors about the importance of a flexible job for those who pursue careers in this industry.
From Stage to Page: Rethinking Your Non-Acting Resume
As an actor you understand that your headshot and resume are your most important tools for telling the world who you are and how they should see you. You update your acting resume regularly. You add new skills and new training as they happen. You prune and tweak until it represents you in a manner that gets you in the door at the casting office. Good for you!
Now let’s talk about the other resume in your life, the non-acting one. You do have one don’t you? Unless you are a trust-fund baby you probably have a resume that you pull out for when you need to find your next survival job.
If you have it handy go get it. I’ll wait…
Okay, did you look at it? Does your non-acting resume do a really good job at marketing your skills? Will I know more about you than that you are a barista at some café? Probably not.
If you follow the standard pattern, your resume is likely some chronological recitation of jobs you have had and some dates, titles, etc. It most likely says you are an actor and perhaps lists the string of temp and service industry jobs you have had. It does, doesn’t it? That’s boring. A bad headshot won’t get you in front of that CD you have been hounding and a boring resume won’t get you in front of me either.
What you need to do is think about your resume in a new way. Your resume should place emphasis on the skills you have that are transferable from the stage back to the page so that you can use them to get you a real-world gig that is not just for survival but is one that you might actually look forward to going to.
Actors have lots of the skills that I strive to find in the technical candidates that I interview. If I could graft the skills actors to the technical skills of the computer science geek, then I would make a fortune placing people in jobs all over the world and I would be able to retire to a nice little island somewhere. The skills you posses as an actor are valued in the workforce. Your challenge is to sell these skills with as much passion and energy as you put into the self-management and self-promotion of your acting. The way to start selling them is to get them on your resume in an appropriate way.
Let me show you what I am talking about.
Here is the “required skills” section of an actual job that I am working on filling right now. Take a look at the italicized text.
Interested? You should have a minimum of ten years experience in developing commercial-grade software at least five years of which should be in the online services and large systems areas. Experience in information retrieval, search, and online services is a definite plus. You must have great communication, time management, and team interaction skills. You should be able to write quality specs, understand design-related issues (especially those that relate to new features), and manage your own features to completion across multiple releases. You should be able to make tradeoffs, to negotiate, and to build consensus, all while keeping the project goals in mind. You should have experience with at least one full commercial product release cycle.
Communication (verbal, nonverbal, listening, writing, and reading between the lines): This is your biggest advantage in the career search. Like most recruiters, I make up my mind about someone in the first five minutes. Uh-huh. I’m done with 99% of the people I talk to by the five-minute mark. The TMAY (Tell Me About Yourself) question weeds out more people than any other thing I look at.
Time Management: Anyone who can go from a commercial facility on Purdue to the lot at Warner Bros. for back-to-back auditions (most likely on a Friday afternoon) has time-management skills. You know how to plan your day in advance; you have your materials, changes of clothes, and a back-up plan just in case. You are demonstrating successful time management. One glance at my calendar and you will understand why Corporate America values this skill. I am triple-parked in many of my time slots yet I get it all done.
Team Interaction: Companies are full of teams that work together to ship product, launch marketing campaigns, and make collective decisions. Many of these teams are dysfunctional because most people don’t know how to work well on teams. Personally, I think it goes back to grade school when kids were told not to copy from their neighbor and to do their work on their own. We do not teach teamwork in school like we should. As an actor you know how to function on a team. After all, isn’t theatre the ultimate team sport? Only if everyone works together and does their part can the show go on. The give-and-take of an ensemble is great training for the corporate boardroom and while you may not be trying to find a C-level job now, you will need this team skill even if you are serving food.
Manage To Completion: I work at a company with an aggressive product shipping schedule. Something is shipping every week from some team or another. When a team ships, they have a party and get an award for shipping. We look to hire people who know how to start and finish things. If you worked a day on a commercial shoot, did what the director asked without causing unnecessary drama, and then went home, you have “managed to completion.” You went. You did your job. You went home. Doesn’t seem like a tough thing, right? Actors “manage to completion” on most jobs (maybe not every job) you are booked on because that is what you do. You would be shocked by how many people working in the tech industry have never been part of a team that shipped a product.
Make Tradeoffs: This is another key skill that I screen candidates for. If a project is running behind schedule, do we increase costs or cut some features? Or do we change the timeline? As you prepare for a cold read, you make quick assessments about the character, how you want to play the character, and what you might know about your intended audience. You are assessing risk and making tradeoffs each time you work through this process.
I hope you are starting to think about your transferable skills now. Let me add a few more to consider: improvisation skills, fast learner, disciplined, focused, entrepreneurial, and passionate. Did you know Corporate America spends lots of money annually bringing in guest speakers to teach teams the very skills you already have?
Okay. Get out your non-acting resume again. You are going to rewrite it in a way that sells you as the self-employed entrepreneur that you are. I don’t want to see the word “actor” on your resume because that will trigger thoughts that you will bail as soon as you land a big gig. (Which is likely true but you don’t want the person hiring you to dwell too long on this thought.)
Your new resume should tell me the following:
You are self-employed, you project manage your tasks to completion while keeping them on time and on budget. You have created and executed marketing plans. You have experience with market demographics and branding. You are a team player and — quite possibly — a team leader. You have strong communication skills. You can negotiate and make tradeoffs that appease all parties involved. You have a strong customer service focus. You can analyze and process large amounts of written and aural data. You can give presentations to a variety of audiences. You have passion. And so on.
So now, when I interview you and give you the TMAY question, you reply with a narrative version of what is on your new resume. I don’t hear that you are an actor who is annoyed that they haven’t had a decent audition in months. I hear that you successfully run your own business and your key strengths are project management and driving customer satisfaction.
Congratulations, you made it past the five-minute mark and I will ask follow-up questions rather than trying to figure out how to dump you to the street. At this point I will ask you what market niche you are in and now you can tell me you are an actor. You have my attention and I am willing to consider you — the actor — even if you will need some serious work/life balance to make auditions and jobs while still doing the job I am about to hire you to do.
I challenge you to pull out your non-acting resume and try to rewrite it to really reflect your transferable skills. You can reset the way that you think about yourself in the non-acting career zone and maybe land a survival gig that you look forward to going to because it lets you get paid to do what you are already good at.
Good luck.
Awesome! Even those of you fortunate enough to need no survival job resume should be able to take from this a bunch of tips and encouragement about how marketable you are and how to navigate the TMAY (I love that) moment. Great foundation, Marie. Thank you and happy staffing!
About Marie Watkins
Marie Watkins has over a decade of experience in the high-tech and bio-tech industries as a staffing professional. During her career in staffing she has been a corporate recruiter, been an agency recruiter, and had her own executive search firm. Marie has hired at all levels for companies like Microsoft adCenter (current), Qualcomm, Motorola, Cardinal Health, Invitrogen, ProFlowers, Sempra Energy, SAIC, and dozens of former dot-com companies. Marie helped build project teams for proof-of-concept work for some of the early work on wireless embedded and Internet devices, as well as tablet PCs.
In addition to recruiting, Marie has a background in human resources (with a specialty in compensation and diversity) and coaches job seekers on how to rethink their job search. Marie holds a BA from UC, San Diego and an MA from Claremont University. She lives in Southern California with her husband and daughter (a young performer with Broadway dreams). In addition to working for Microsoft, Marie volunteers as the statewide costume coordinator for MET2. Marie can be contacted via LinkedIn and at Facebook.
This contribution originally ran at Bonnie Gillespie’s online column on May 15, 2009.