Okay, I’m sifting through resumes (for an office/clerical job) and as usual there are some immediate discards. I am tempted to call one particular person in, just to get a look.
Here is an excerpt:
[quote]
Computer Experience 2000 – 2007[ul]Created and led an online guild across two servers for two years [li]Moderated a private Ragnarok Online server and designed custom quests []Active in multiple online communities for the past seven years []Artistically active in volunteer online game projects [/ul][/li][/quote] “A very attractive skillset. Unfortunately, this position requires someone who can consume large quantities of Mountain Dew and has demonstrated an ability to complete Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda without a bathroom break.”
Doesn’t sound all that weird, but it guarantees that 98% of your applicants will have no concept of the standard arrangement of the alphabet.
I feel sorry for the OP and his company… I’ve seen temps do wacky things like dump everything they didn’t get to under N for “Not Done” or T for “Tomorrow, I’ll get to it” - kooky stuff like that. My all-time favorite was the 25-ish guy who had no concept of even numbers. He was completely flummoxed that a check number could end in 0, 2, 4, 6 or 8, and couldn’t locate them in a file to save his job.
No idea how he got into the building at 310 That Street and navigated the elevator to the 12th floor.
I had a temp help me file some correspondence. The way the routine worked in this office is letters came in on accounts, the account file was pulled, and I referred to the file while replying to the correspondence, and filed my response. The temp just filed the incoming mail in the file. This is, of course, a recipe for disaster with many customers wondering why they never got a response. This temp was dense, but she was extremely cheerful and completely devoid of attitude, so she cheerfully went through all my files to find the ones that had loose incoming mail. Bless her heart.
Weirdest resume/ application I ever saw, and I saw it repeatedly, for every job we posted, was from Extreme Detail Man. He had held many low-level jobs for short periods of time. He got the concept of action verbs. However, every job was described like: Cooked burger. Put burger on bun. Put pickle on burger. Put onions on burger. Put lettuce on burger. Wrapped sandwich. Put sandwich in bag. Took money from customer. Gave change to customer.
Imagine 20 pages of that.
Several of his jobs were fast food, so the part above is a close paraphrase. I felt bad for him, he was pretty clearly mentally ill but still expected/expecting to support himself. But he did not have the makings of “an asset to our team.”
The guy we had around here a few weeks ago had a good trick. If he couldn’t figured out where a particular document went, he crumpled it into a ball and shoved it into a drawer. Of course, when the person who actually used that drawer returned from vacation…
I once received a resume that was all in the third person. It was full of sentences like “Beth has demonstrated her leadership abilities by chairing XYZ project and…”
That one still confuses me. Is there some industry where this is common?
I once started a job where the previous occupant had tried really, really hard, according to the bosses, but just couldn’t cut it.
It didn’t help when I found that 75% of the wall of cabinets behind my desk was filled with the papers she couldn’t file, the travel vouchers that just had to be signed and returned for reimbursement, and anything else she didn’t know how to/didn’t want to deal with. :rolleyes: Took me two years to clean up her mess. And yes, that involved filing. Lots and lots of filing.
Of course, that was the same firm that had an offsite storage database that hadn’t been properly maintained. The only guy in records who was actually capable of finding anything from offsite storage was, of course, the one who sent a penis joke to the wrong person and got fired on the spot. :smack:
Seriously, I would think that running a guild and migrating it across two servers would actually speak pretty well to someone’s people skills; keeping people happy in that situation could be difficult, it would seem to me. Not, perhaps, relevant to the job at hand, but still useful information for some employer.
See, my intent was to wait for someone to run into pronoun trouble, and then reveal “Against all the laws of God and Nature, this resume was submitted by a she!”
Now I’m all bummed and stuff.
That reminds me, I had another resume which included way too many sentences ending with “…and stuff” to be considered strictly professional. (Three. Am I being too harsh for considering this way too many? Again, I guess I was asking for it.)
“Sir, I am a slacker, but I am a responsible slacker who is actually doing constructive things in my gaming time. And I need a job to pay for my Hot Pockets.”
Rather cool actually, but I met a guy once who would put “Nobel Peace Prize winner” on his resume. Seems he was part of a UN Peacekeping Force somewhere when that agency won the Peace Prize in I think it was 1977. So technically, he was a co-recipient, along with a few thousand others.
“A very attractive skillset. Unfortunately, this position requires someone who can consume large quantities of Mountain Dew and has demonstrated an ability to complete Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda without a bathroom break.”