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.
Not to change the subject, but I’m intrigued by the resume that stated they worked for Creative Technologies since that’s my company’s parent. Granted that’s probably in Singapore, but I would hope that if we had an employee who didn’t spell-check their resume, we got rid of them fairly quickly.
Apparently, the “reputedness” of many established organizations is in question more often than I originally thought.
@Monica: No, I doubt your company got rid of them due to spelling mistakes on their resume — more likely they were (or will be) “let go” because of their lack of attention to detail or their total ineptitude.