Resumes to Throw in the Trash
Unfortunately, I have to interview a lot of candidates that have somehow gotten through the apparently inept first-line screeners. Most of these candidates are complete idiots.
In a single, recent resume/interview, the applicant:
- failed to capitalize her street name;
- misspelled both her cities of residence and employment;
- misformatted her zip code and phone number;
- proclaimed her expertise in Java, JAVA, and java;
- used the J-builder and Jbuilder IDEs (but apparently not the more familiar JBuilder);
- was supposedly an expert in Java Servlets, Servelets, and servlets;
- was “well experienced” in both Oracle and oracle;
- built and created “pachages” of J2EE and j2ee components;
- was thorough in Javascript, java script, and Java Script; (looking for JavaScript)
- supposedly created custom tag libraries for JSPs, but had no idea what a TLD file is; and
- indicated she was very knowledgeable in the use of regular expressions, but couldn’t create the most basic expression to replace the word “cat” with the word “dog”.
In several other equally horrific resumes, the candidates included more ridiculous quotes:
- “Worked for reputed Organizations like IBM, Creative Technologies, NCR Corp.” — Last time I checked they really were organizations, not just purported to be organizations. And why capitalize “organizations”?
- “Extracuccicular Activities” — Nice spell checking. In addition, the title’s link pointed to
\\Users\Paul\Documents\theater_resume.html— Paul is neither a user on my computer nor on our network. - “I especially enjoy designing and developing internet application.” — Just one?
- “Lead a GUI development team in creating Graphic User Interface for the two main company’s products.” — Once again, a pluralization mismatch.
- “Sun Certificied Java Progrmmer 1.4 certification” — Kthxbye.
- “Masters in Business Adminstration with Telecommunications management major” — And yet you can’t manage to spell your own degree correctly.
- “Supported this product in prodution environments” — Ever hear of spell check?
- “Ported code to PowerPC architcture.” — Say it with me: ar-ki-tek-cher.
- “Create and oversee all information arcitecture, website design, online marketing, Flash developement, mobile and online apps.” And on the next line: “Responsible for concept, design and development of new products throught Atlantic Records.” — Most word processors these days come with a spell-check button, if they don’t do it automatically.
- “I am currently working on the design & architucture of the latest release which is expected to be completed by July 2006.” — Can no one spell “architecture”?!
- “Design and development of Struts components & jsp Pages using Eclipse as development tool and Tomcat as the web Server.” — Seems to have difficulty understanding what should be capitalized, and what shouldn’t, a surprisingly common find on many resumes written by those with a certain prolific Southern Asian ancestry.
- “Objective: A challenge job in software engineering that has growth opportunity.” — Not on my team, even if you can eventually figure out where to place the indefinite article.
- “Lead the offshore development team and explain them the key features.” — Are you sure you weren’t the offshore team?
- “Learnt various technologies fast in pace with requirements of the project demands.” — Spell checking, better grammar, and a well-placed comma would have helped this thought dearly.
- “Evaluate our systems to decide which system performance the best.” — When you combine that with “Doing research on high risky accounts” in the next paragraph, you know you have a winner.
When people can’t be bothered to double-check and proof-read their own resumes, which are theoretically used to sell themselves in the absolute best light possible, it tends to reflect upon the actual work they do — equally mistake-ridden, buggy, and performed with a lack of attention to detail.
And I never want to see the candidate again who was late to an interview because he had forgotten to push the ninth-floor button in the elevator. After a few minutes of inactivity, the lights went out to save power, and he stood there in the dark for 20 minutes. Noticing that he was late, our receptionist called him on his cell phone, at which point he reported that he was stuck on the sixth floor with the lights out. He neither had the insight to try pushing our floor button again, or even to call anyone for assistance.
Thank you for your time. Don’t call us; we’ll call you.
Oh, don’t get me started!
(Too late.)
I spend a great deal of time on my own resume. It is clear, concise, well-organized and memorable. I’ve had at least two people who’ve hired me at two different companies use it as an example. I take great care to ensure that all verb tenses match, all bullet points and headings line up, no bullet points end with periods (they are not sentences) etc etc etc. And I have no patience at all for anyone who can’t take a similar level of care.
Especially since I hire QA Engineers. The task of testing software is, at its core, detail-oriented and nit-picky. Even when (especially when) dealing with increasingly complex and diverse environments you still really need someone who can make sure the little things are in order.
And if a candidate can’t bother to take the time to make sure their resume, which they supposedly have all the time they need to work on, is formatted and spelled correctly there is no way they are going to be able to do a detailed and careful job when under deadline pressure.
And I’m astounded by the number of resumes passed to me by recruiters which are rife with misspellings. I mean, c’mon! Spell checking a document has got to be the single easiest thing to. And if you can’t bother to even friggin’ spell check your resume I do not want to talk with you.
The only joy I get out of the process of reviewing resumes is telling the recruiters and candidates exactly why I’m rejecting them. I used to be more diplomatic about it, but I’m fed up and they should know why. Both barrels, I say.
There should be a after the “mon”.
Thanks.
Grrr. ” …should be a after the… “
oh, forget it. sigh
And that’s why I always click the Preview button before submitting a comment, especially when embedded HTML is involved.
In order for the HTML to show up in the comment like this:
your actual comment must look something like this:
I usually forget to hit any preview button (they’re still a bit of a novelty on blogs).
And I thought I’d be able to go back and fix any typos anyway…
It is bloggers like me that have to lead the way towards better blogs!
I removed all “non-me” users when the blog was under attack last month because symptoms seemed to indicate that a user account had been compromised, allowing the attackers to gain “legitimate” access and use the SQL injection exploit to gain even higher access to administrative functions.
Hello Richard;
Ran into your site while trying to find an archived image for Zoho (remember that company?)…I worked for you there in 2000.
I did find an archived index page for Zoho (amazing it still is out there).
Thanks for showin’ a guy a good time in 2000!
“It was the best of times, it was the strangest of times”
Cheerio
Bill Nelson
Yup, there’s quite a few archived pages of the original zoho.com out there. As the official company historian, I should republish my old company history data for the heck of it someday before it’s completely forgotten.
Ex-CEO Bill Fraine seems to have pushed Zoho out of his mind completely; last year he declined a LinkedIn invitation indicating that he didn’t know me. Too bad; he needs someone in his pocket who understands the web — his current project, Eggs Overnight, is unknown on Google, thanks to an inept website design that doesn’t mention the name of the company in crawlable text and is titled “Unknown Document”. Ironically, merely mentioning his website on my blog will give his company better exposure, considering there are no known links to the company anywhere else.
Gee. He remembered me well enough a year or two ago to accept my LinkedIn invite. At that time he was selling speedboats in Florida. Moved on to eggs, eh?