Please suggest some "bad résumé" and bad cover letter pointers

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been asked to do two examples of a good and bad résumé and cover letter for a bulletin board display for student job applications. I’m to use the same job/education experience in each. I also have a bit of a cold and I’m just not quite firing on all cylinders. The good ones are pretty easy to do, but bad ones are harder. (Googling bad covlets or bad rs.s brings up plenty but mostly offers for books or humor pages.)
What are some suggestions you have for the bad résumé (preferably things you’ve actually seen)? It doesn’t have to be humorous but I do prefer things that are fairly broad just because they stand out and show students why something may not be a good idea. I prefer routine mistakes- things you’ve actually seen or (like me) done in the past that weren’t good ideas.

A few that I’ve seen that irritate me:

  • Misspellings are very very very not good (especially of an employer’s name or your academic major, both of which I have actually seen).

*Be consistent. If you start with last-job first and go in reverse chronological order, do the same thing with your education.

*Personally I don’t like objectives at all (your objective is to get hired for whatever the hell you’re applying for), but if you have to put one don’t blow smoke up their ass with “To secure employment with a superior company of excellent reputation such as Consolidated Mutual Ltd.” (I’ve seen similar things to this). I think that “Position#24601” is a better objective (i.e. specific to the application), but I also think that’s better dealt with in a cover letter.

*“References available upon request”, while not unprofessional, is, imo, unnecessary as most employers automatically assume this.

*NOTHING that identifies you by religion, race, nationality, marital status, or any other demographic if you can help it. Obviously if you graduated from Bob Jones University it can be assumed you’re white and Christian or if your name is Muhammad ibn Said al Zaheem it can be generally assumed you’re probably not Jewish and if you went to Morehouse you’re probably a black man, but I’m referring to people who mention (and I’ve seen this) “Elder in Mt. Zion Baptist Church” or “I am married with three children”, which I’ve seen in cover letters and on resumes.

  • There are a thousand bazillion free email services out there. If you want to be PhunkyButt69@gahoomail.com that’s fine, but for God’s sake get a ‘conservative’ email for your résumé. t_j_brown@gahoomail.com may not be as cute but it definitely looks better.

  • Plain white or off white or at most beige-ish heavy bond paper is best. NO patterns (not counting watermarks) and preferably not copy paper.

  • Don’t say you “assured correctness in the intake and registration of revenue” when what you did was balance the cash drawer. Just say that balancing the cash drawer was a responsibility.

*It’s not so much unprofessional as just unnecessary to mention your reason for leaving a job, no matter how legitimate.

Could you please suggest some others? It’s been a long time since I had to do a résumé for myself; I do academic CVs and the rules are quite different (a CV can be 15 pages as long as it’s relevant, but résumé’s need to be far more concise).

2

There are many instances when the “one page rule” can be safely violated. If you’re over 30 then a properly informative résumé will probably not fit on a single page. Also, having a lot of published research papers will necessarily fill out your résumé to greater lengths.

If you are a 23-year-old with a BA and one year of work experience, however, there is no excuse for sending in a 17-page résumé, complete with the name and address of your elementary school Tae Kwon Do teacher, list of favorite authors and random snippets of “personal philosophy” scattered throughout. You should also not top all this off by writing your cover letter in marker.

“The important thing is to get noticed” is good advice, but within limits. This young gentleman definitely got noticed, and while we held on to his résumé longer than most of the others, that was only because it would have jammed the shredder if dumped in all at once.

3

THe best “what not to do” from a resume that I have seen with my own eyes:
Bachelor of Engineering (failed) at XYZ university.

If you failed, leave it out.

4

Use a smiley emoticon in a description of responsibilities.
Switch tenses.
Use color and font size changes for emphasis.
Use the wrong word (“suppose” for “oppose”).
List an irrelevant job (cashier at Bob’s Liquors for a teaching resume).
Change punctuation (use : except in a few places, where you use – instead).
Spell one of your position titles incorrectly.
Have a header or footer that says “X resume” where “X” is a potential employer, but you are sending the resume to Y.
susan with the 18-page CV.

5

Friend of mine goes through jobb applications for the local university and assorted other academic institutions. The one thing she complains about the most is otherwise perfect resumes - that don’t point out which position is being applied for.

6

I hate redundancy when reviewing resumes. If you said it once, be sure you haven’t accidentally said it again elsewhere. Also, some of the fancier resume layouts are bizarrely annoying. I reviewed one the other day that had companies previously worked for set up bulletstyle in the margins.

7

I saw a resume once in which the writer was clearly used resume writing software. It would read:

University of Virginia, B.A. Engineering, 1991

[INSERT SECOND UNIVERSITY OR INSTITUTION HERE]

Manager, IHOP, 1991-2000

[INSERT SECOND JOB HERE]

He had neglected to clear unused fields, and this was for a professional position.

8

If you’re a consultant with 12 years experience in that field, and before that 5 years experience in business administration, do not include your high school summer job delivering pizza. Nobody gives a FF. Or a F in any other position, either.
Resumes where the only formatting is the personal info on top everything else is these clumps of letters with not even line breaks and often no punctuation in fact I remember one which misbelieved in punctuation so much that he didn’t use those little dots at the ends of paragraphs which made the whole mess even more unreadable since he wasn’t leaving blank lines between paragraphs either
You know sort of like this example only often with more letters in each paragraph and isn’t it nice that the previous paragraph happens to end at the end of a line I promise I didn’t do it on purpose it came out that way
Oh, and did I forget to mention, sentences that aren’t so much “run on” as an attempt at record-breaking?

It’s the first time I see a mention of “saying in the CV for what position you’re applying.” I’ve always done that in the cover letter, and always been told to do it in the cover letter. Half my jobs have come from companies picking up my CV which they had on file from one or three years before, where a CV that was too position-specific would also be bad. None of those jobs was the position I’d initially applied for. Maybe this is field-dependant.

9

Slightly different approach to CVs over here I guess, but I did see one the other day (I work in a university) that was written in txt spk. Not a gr8 idea.

10

Using Comic Sans makes you look like a 14yo girl
Ditto pink

11

Kind of touched on, but don’t include hobbies and organizations you belong to that are irrelevant to the position you’re applying for.

That you sponsor a scrapbooking session every other Wednesday is fascinating to someone, just probably not HR at XYZ Corp.

Likewise that you’re the captain of the champion darts team in your league.

12

Last year I received a resumé for a clerical position which listed various video game achievements under the heading “Computer Experience.” (There is a thread here wherein you may find some more examples.)

I also one saw a resumé with a “Hobbies and Interests” section: Going to bars, gambling, and playing pool. :dubious:

13

Don’t list hobbies or interests unless it is directly relevant to the job (such as if you are applying for a programming job and have done some volunteer programming work on an open source software project). Even if it is directly relevant to the job, consider omitting any hobbies or interest having anything to do with anything that might be remotely controversial, such as politics or religion.

If you list a personal website, make sure it is up to date and there is nothing on it that could be seen as offensive, unprofessional, or controversial. Make sure there are no links on it to anything that could be seen that way. You really are best off not listing a personal website unless everything on it is job-related.

Don’t list an email address that you don’t check regularly. If you have a sig line for that email that contains anything other than your contact information, disable it for the duration of your job search. You should definitely not have anything humorous or controversial in your sig. A prospective employer’s idea of what is funny may not match yours.

The phone number you list should have an answering machine or voice mail that you check regularly. The greeting for that answering machine or voice mail should include your name, and should not contain anything humorous.

Use a standard font like Times New Roman, use only one font, and do not use any color other than black.

Have a Word .doc version of your resume and a plain text version. Some people, companies, and job websites will want one, some will want the other, and some may want both. Check the formatting of your plain text resume carefully. Make sure it has the same line breaks as your Word resume, and make sure there are no Word-specific characters that don’t render properly in plain text.

Use bulleted lists. But be aware that these are a common offender for creating un-renderable characters when cut and pasted into plain text. Don’t use any fancy images or symbols for bullet points- standard black bullets are what you want.

Don’t use the same words over and over again. There are online dictionaries and thesauruses to help you find other words to use.

Don’t skimp on the white space to get your resume down to one page. That rule is less important now than it was in the past. It’s better to have an easier to read two-page resume than a crammed one-pager.

Don’t list your high school or the year you graduated from high school on your resume.

14

Now that I’ve got a little time for some research, there are quite a few websites with really bad examples of resumes that have been submitted.

Bad resumes.

Previous thread. Wierdo Resumes

And let us never forget the importance of l33t speak to make a lasting impression.

15

I hate cover letters that obviously are boilerplate, and the writer has done nothing to make the letter specific to the position or institution. As Susan mentioned with the resume, big no-nos include forgetting to change a reference to another employer you used the same letter for. (The letter refers throughout to XYZ Company, until the closing, which says, “I look forward to meeting with you to discuss my future with ABC Incorporated.”)

Since I work in higher ed, the other thing that REALLY bugs me is boilerplate letters that refer to “your company.” We’re a university, not a “company.”

16

That always drove me nuts on job applications – “Reason for leaving last job?” Why does anyone leave a job? You don’t like it any more and/or you’re looking for higher pay. Do prospective employers really expect anyone to say “Got fired for stealing” or “Assaulted the boss”?

17

If they do ask that, it means they can get rid of people who did do stuff like that at previous jobs. If you answer truthfully that you got fired for stealing or assaulting the boss, they can avoid hiring you. But even if you lie and say you weren’t fired, it can work to their advantage if they find out later that you were fired for stealing or assaulting the boss. They can fire you for lying on your application, which means they’re rid of a risky employee without having to wait for you to actually do something bad at your current job.

18

Wouldn’t something like that depend upon the job for which you’re applying? If you’re going for a junior management / team leader type position, wouldn’t the fact that you lead and motivate etc a team be highly appropriate?

19

The one that seems to be bugging me most lately is applicants who list educational institutions they attended without listing dates or degrees.

tells me absolutely nothing. Did you graduate? Get a Masters? Take an extension course? To me that looks like you flunked out.

20

I saw a resume today for a job as a journalist that in two places mentioned affiliation with a political party. Very bad move.