Having spent the last few days reviewing about a hundred resumes, I’d like to give the world some do’s and don’ts.
1) For starters, the rumors are true, your resume gets between 20-40 seconds of attention before a decision is made.
2) 8-Paged Resumes. I see about two a day. Are you Thomas Edison? Are you Leonardo Da Vinci? Or are you just some run of the mill clown who feels the need to regale me with every single task you’ve ever performed in your life? Here’s a secret: If your resume is above two pages, I trash it faster than any other resume. Worse yet, of the 20 seconds I spend not reading your resume, most of that is spent scrolling down to see if you’ve broken my record of longest resume received (currently 9 pages). Perhaps next time you can send in some Cliffs Notes to accompany your resume. Oh wait, the resume is supposed to be the summary. Idiots!
3) You like traveling? Wow! So does everyone else. You enjoy skydiving? I don’t give a flying fuck. Furthermore, if you’re a thrill seeker this isn’t the place for you. Your daily work diet will consist of PowerPoint, PowerPoint, and even more PowerPoint. You’ll be doing so much PPT that you’ll be dreaming of meaningless buzzwords in different fonts. Some douchebag somewhere will have a hallway conversation with a potential client, then he’ll tell his minion to mock up a sales pitch, then that same flunky will punt the work to you and make you redo it 7 times. Almost as exhilarating as skydiving, right? If you’re lucky we may even ask you to make a few pivot tables in Excel. We will grind your spirit into the ground. We will crush your soul with a relentless barrage of boondoggles. Unless your primary hobby involves Microsoft Office or you are applying to be a summer intern, get rid of the “Activities and Interests” section in your CV immediately. Amateur.
4) Boomerang employees. Come crawling back ‘eh? When is that ever a good look? You dumped your girlfriend in search of better options, things didn’t pan out like you thought, and now you want her to take you back? F you! I have too much respect for women to allow this. There are no safety relationships in life you philandering prick.
5) Linear paths are critical. You jumped from Finance, to Healthcare, to Marketing, and now you want to come back to finance? You’re 37 years old and you’re still trying to find yourself!? Let me give you a life lesson, chief. By your early 30s you either need to have found your life calling or settled into a specific, shitty path that you don’t enjoy like the rest of us. You still don’t know what you want to do when you grow up?.... Newsflash: You’re already grown up. Get lost.
6) I don’t care where you went to school but I do care when you graduated. I’m in my mid 30’s so when I see a candidate who graduated college in 2015 applying for a job at my level I trash the resume and send a note to the recruiter that the candidate “is too green”. Tough luck. Respect your elders you little bitch.
7) Professional Summary Paragraphs: “I am an experienced project manager committed to teamwork and collaborative problem solving. I am goal-oriented….” – NEXT! Remember, 20-40 seconds, and you just spent the first 10 seconds of my glorious attention span boring me with vapid fluff. My favorites are those resumes where three quarters of the first page are taken up by the professional summary followed by a long list of self-designated “skills”…. Why would you bury your actual experience like that? Are you hiding something? Also, I’ll be the judge of your skills. Side Note: A few days ago, someone actually listed “basketball” in their skills section.
8) Job descriptions don’t matter. The job descriptions we have are so vague and incongruent with what you’ll actually be doing that I don’t even bother reading them. You tricksters out there may have fooled the screening robot by just regurgitating the same key words from the job description into your resume but your strategy has now backfired: These job descriptions are written by recruiters and low level HR people that have no idea what they’re talking about so now you just sound like an idiot. Next!
9) We will not be emailing you back at BrownNasty37@whatever.com. Also, I think I might have received an email from you back in 2008 with the subject heading “F#cK Tig!t PuSs! B!g D!cK An@l”. Frankly, I’m surprised that our resume system didn’t throw your application in the spam box immediately. You’d be surprised at the amount of people that have some absurd email address listed in their contact information. This is a place of business, damn it! We make game-changing, strategic, collaborative, optimized PowerPoints here!
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