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

In My Humble Opinion
81

When a company says “resumes in Word format”, or “no calls”, or anything like that, they mean it. If that contradicts something your career counselor or book on job hunting told you, that means your counselor or book is wrong in this specific situation, and should be ignored.

“I want to send a sonic death ray through your phone” or “I hate you” are NOT things you want a prospective employer to be thinking about when they think of your name.

If you do call to follow up, leave a voice mail if they don’t answer. Calling and not leaving a voice mail might be acceptable when you’re just calling your friends to chat. It’s not acceptable when calling to follow up on your resume. They know who you are, thanks to caller ID.

82

[QUOTE=Cunctator]
I was intrigued by the “no hobbies” advice too. Certainly here we’re similar to Canada. All of the resumés that I see have the candidates’ hobbies listed. And a candidate who listed no outside work interests would be binned straight away as “not a well rounded person”.
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Screw that. I get enough of that from my parents. What I do in my own free time is my own damn business and nobody else’s. The only thing that a potential employer should be concerned with is “how well can this person do the job?” What I choose to do in my own time has no bearing on that whatsoever.

83

[QUOTE=Anne Neville]
When a company says “resumes in Word format”, or “no calls”, or anything like that, they mean it. If that contradicts something your career counselor or book on job hunting told you, that means your counselor or book is wrong in this specific situation, and should be ignored.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, that was me who wanted to send the sonic death ray alright.

Not every company has a full-time HR person to take incoming calls from applicants or to answer their questions. I have a specific time slot scheduled later this week during which time I will be reviewing all the CVs submitted, until then, there’s a very good chance I will be out of the office, and no one else here will be able to answer any applicant’s question.

The applicant I pitted called my extension 26 times this afternoon and never left a message. During that time I had a meeting in my office, a couple conference calls, and several business calls, so I couldn’t answer his calls even if I wanted to. My phone makes an audible alert whenever someone calls on the other line. So his calls were really disruptive. If you are responding to a job ad that asks: “Please, no phone calls. Only selected candidates will be contacted.” there is usually a good reason for that request.

I don’t mind at all the applicants who left a follow-up message to be sure that I got their resumes by email. That is prudent. You want to be sure your resume wasn’t caught up in a spam filter or something. If “Jane Smith” calls to verify that her email had been received, when I have time to check my voicemail and my email, and I see there’s nothing in my email in-box from Jane Smith, I can ask her to resubmit. Calling and hanging up 26 times will just make me want to kill you.

As for the OP’s question:
Something I’m having crop up a lot are applicant’s who are way too overqualified applying for our part-time “Junior Assistant” position aimed for student candidates. We can’t meet the salary expectations of someone with 10 years experience as a “Senior Director”.

If you have a post-graduate degree in Library Science and 15 years experience as a Senior Archivist, then the “part-time filing clerk, student position” will a) bore you so badly that you leave in less than a month or b) we’ll assume you’re actually still looking for a more suitable position and we’re just a stop-gap. We can’t afford to spend the time and resources on training an employee who we are reasonably sure will jump ship when a more suitable opportunity comes around. There are, of course exceptions, like we have some former retirees and a stay-at-home mom who are re-entering the workforce on a part-time basis for a little extra income and because they just like to work a couple days a week and on-going part-time positions were perfect for them.

84

[QUOTE=Cunctator]
I was intrigued by the “no hobbies” advice too. Certainly here we’re similar to Canada. All of the resumés that I see have the candidates’ hobbies listed. And a candidate who listed no outside work interests would be binned straight away as “not a well rounded person”.
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I figured it might be better to list no outside work interests at all than to put down a couple of specific ones. You wouldn’t interpret someone who listed no outside work interests simply as “a guy who doesn’t put his outside interests in his resume”? I don’t list anything on my resume, but interviewers sometimes ask and I usually get a good discussion out of it and a chance to make a connection with them.

85

[QUOTE=Rysto]
Screw that. I get enough of that from my parents. What I do in my own free time is my own damn business and nobody else’s. The only thing that a potential employer should be concerned with is “how well can this person do the job?” What I choose to do in my own time has no bearing on that whatsoever.
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Yeah, but in Canada and Australia, employers expect you to list hobbies on your resume. If you’re applying for a job in one of those countries, you should suck it up and list some on your resume.

This brings up an important point: In making up your resume or cover letter, what a prospective employer expects to see is more important than what you think should or shouldn’t be on a resume or cover letter, or what you think is important or interesting about you. In almost any job, being able to suck it up and do what you’re asked to do, even if you think it’s stupid or unnecessary, is an important skill. If you can’t do that when you’re applying for a job, your employer will think that, if you get the job, you will make trouble until you get everything your own way. You shouldn’t expect your employer to arrange everything to suit you.

86

You know what else I would add: if you have a crappy resume (ie little to no relevant experience, or an embarrassing or socially unacceptable job), dress it up as best you can, but don’t dress it up TOO much.

I once got a resume from a woman who gave her job title as “Ecdysiast.” (If you don’t know it, don’t look it up yet) She had held this job for nearly a decade. Her skills were management, money handling, conflict resolution, public relations, and customer service. Great! Just what we’re looking for.

Until I looked up “ecdysiast.” It means “stripper.” Now, I’ve known me some strippers and I don’t have any problem believing that all of her skills were genuine. But for god’s sake, lie a little bit. Dress it down. Make your title “Personnel manager of Hoohaw’s” or “freelance massage artist” or something. I cannot possibly go to my boss and say “This girl’s been a stripper for 10 years! Let’s bring her in for an interview!” and expect to be taken seriously.

But if she were just the day manager of a strip club or something, that’s “real” experience. We could bring her in for an interview and she could tell funny stories that show off her skills and maybe get the job.

87

[QUOTE=fuffle]
I cannot possibly go to my boss and say “This girl’s been a stripper for 10 years! Let’s bring her in for an interview!” and expect to be taken seriously.

But if she were just the day manager of a strip club or something, that’s “real” experience. We could bring her in for an interview and she could tell funny stories that show off her skills and maybe get the job.
[/QUOTE]
We hired two ex-strippers (one male, one female, about a year apart) for tech support positions at my old company. Since there were ten people in that office, our support crew was 20% strippers. We had no problem with that: they were good on the phone and understood customer service well.

Had they claimed to be strip club managers, we would have found out when we checked their references, and neither would have gotten a call for an interview.

Lying on a resume is a bad thing – and it gives your employer a reason to fire you at any point if they discover it after you’re hired.

88

It depends on the job. Tech support, I can see being totally straight on your resume. Applying to be a regional manager? Better to fudge a bit. I don’t have any problem with strippers as people or as a profession, but you can’t deny there’s a general stigma, which only becomes more of a burden the more responsible a position you’re looking for.

The jobs I’ve worked, the office environments I’ve been in, lying would definitely be the way to go. As evidenced by the fact by the fact that the ecdysiast went straight to the round file. If I were hiring tech support at a relaxed office, no biggie.

But back to my original point: calling yourself an “ecdysiast” is really just silly. Say “entertainer” or “exotic dancer” or something. Otherwise you just look pretentious.

89

Hah, that reminds me of a job applicant I evaluated. Her resume made much of the fact that she was very active in Miss America pageant organizing and had once been crowned Miss Some-State-I-Forget-Which.

That got the guys in our office going; they wanted to interview her just to see what she looked like. I was bending over backward not to be prejudiced against her just because her interests were so diametrically opposed to my own, and the rest of her resume was okay in terms of work history, education, etc. So the resume content did not preclude us from interviewing her.

What WAS more of a problem was her cover letter, which started with the memorable sentence (at least, memorable in conjunction with knowing she was a beauty pageant winner) “I saw your job advertisement and it got me really excited.”

Funny thing is, due to an unlikely set of circumstances (mostly boiling down to desperation for a decent candidate) we did end up hiring her. And she was actually smart, funny, somewhat of a feminist, and a decent writer. After we had become friends, I told her how that opening sentence had made the office howl with laughter, and had practically kept her from getting interviewed.

She didn’t see what was funny about that sentence. Odd, huh?