Monday, January 5, 2009

Memorable resumes - A look back

I've been a recruiter now 8+ years and you can believe I've seen tens of thousands of resumes along the way and spoken to many of them for positions that I had been working on at specific times. After a while the whole thing becomes a big blur but the ones I end up remembering for some reason are not necessarily the outstanding applicants but the horribly bad ones. So here's a brief summary of some of those people I've come across who just made me say "What the heck?" To protect their identities and also to avoid any legal issues, I'll disguise specific info.

The PhD.
This guy had a Bachelor's in Computer Engineering, Masters in Physics and Computer Engineering, PhD in Physics from some very well known Universities.

At the time of our discussion he was working on campus in the Computer Science department as a computer tech and Teacher's Assistant. How did we end up getting in touch? He submitted his resume and then called me about a job that paid $22-25 per hour. The interesting thing is that this was an entry level position for a Desktop support technician. Not only that but he was looking for anything about $18 per hour. I don't know what this guy is doing now but there is no way we would have considered him for the position we had open at the time.

It just makes me wonder what he was thinking.


The Shotgun guy
I remember this guy from when I was at a very large financial company during it's hayday. As a company we were doing very well and growing tremendously. (We were the leader in the industry actually). We probably had at least 200 open positions on a given month and I was in charge of around 30 of them. He still shows up from time to time and I always know it's him because he applies to everything.

I mean litterally, he applied to all 200 of the open positions including VP level jobs that he clearly could not possibly qualify for. I remember opening up his file and checking out his resume.

Guys like this, sorry to say, are typically at the lower levels and have no clue what they want to do so they just apply for everything hoping they get a call on something. -- NOTE: THIS IS A VERY POOR approach to say the least.

There are some obvious issues with this approach and they become even more visible when the positions are with the same company. I can only hope he figured out that nobody wants to hire someone who is that confused.

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