Ever since receiving a promotion at work a little while ago I’ve found that one of my main duties is serving as a hiring manager for my office. Between retirements and position changes and job additions I have been hiring and moving people around for the better part of a year now. I have seen hundreds (maybe thousands) of resumés over that time and I thought I would impart upon you some of the things which could very well be preventing you from getting that dream job or even that pity interview.
As I’m wading through all these resumés and cover letters and job applications I have several things that I’m ultimately looking for, no matter what kind of position it is. I’m looking for:
It’s only okay to send naked photos of yourself with your resumé if you’re hot.
1. Someone who can do the job.
2. Someone who wants to do the job.
3. Someone who will stay for more than a few months.
4. Someone who will fit in with the current staff.
That’s it. I don’t care if you’re brilliant or have excellent oral hygiene or know the Pope on a personal level. I don’t care about your hobbies or your volunteer work or what kind of position you want. I just want to know that you’ll help out, won’t screw me and won’t end up pissing off everyone else. It helps to know if you’re hot, but if you’re really annoying you still won’t get the job.
Below are some of the horrifying things I’ve seen on resumés that have landed on my desk. Please, for your career, don’t do these:
Use a wacky email address: Sure, having an email address like “hansolo32@aol.com” or “sexxxy-latin-mamma@comcast.net” is clever and fun when you shout it across the bar as you order your seventh beer on a Friday night. It’s really not all that amusing, and even a little bit creepy, at 10am while I’m sipping my coffee and wearing pants. Here’s a tip: free email. Welcome to the 1990’s. Just get a professional address and stop putting “funkychunkymunky@verizon.net” at the top of your resumé.
State in your cover letter that you’re applying for multiple jobs in the same company: I work for a large company and we always have a lot of job openings. Please don’t write one letter and resumé and send it in for all the open jobs that sound interesting. That just tells me you really don’t care about MY open job, you just want ANY open job. Sure, I know, you were once told that if you “just send your resume in” out of the blue that the Human Resources department will hold on to it and lovingly care for it and hold it until the perfect job opens up and they’ll call you in. That’s a load of manure. Human Resources people are swamped and they don’t care about finding you a job. They care about how they’re going to reprimand that guy in accounting who keeps putting up pornographic photos of sheep on his cube wall. If I’m expected to have the decency to call you in for an interview then YOU should have the decency to write a separate letter and resumé for my open position.
State in your cover letter that you can’t find a job and you’ve been applying for months/years/decades: Sooo… you’re a loser. Don’t advertise it. If someone else doesn’t want to hire you, why would I? Seriously, cover letters and resumés are about listing strengths and being positive and blowing sunshine up my ass. Be truthful, but just enough to get in the door. The interview is when I’ll have a chance to find out things that are less than wonderful like your habit of picking your nose with your tongue.
Use abbreviations that aren’t explained: I work in a somewhat technical field, so I get this a lot. I see resumes that list experience with “I-Mod 4.3, 4.4, 4.45 and configulating RMF adapters under EEbIEM Licensing protocol 92.1.” Great. Thank you. I’m very impressed. Right now I’m using Microsoft Word 12.0.6311.4998 SP1. Do you think I’m smarter for it? No, you think I’m a tool. I find that older tech workers love to cram in all sorts of pseudo-technical terms and product names with versions, hoping that a bunch of letters and abbreviations will sound impressive enough to get them in the door. Guess what? If Human Resources can’t figure out what the hell you’re talking about I probably won’t even get a chance to see your alphabet soup of a resumé. Write your resumé and cover letter so that a 5th grader can understand it. Remember: your future boss will be the one who hires you and think about how stupid you think most bosses are.
List your boring hobbies: I’ve never hired someone or even invited them in for an interview because they liked “music, reading, going for walks and surfing the Internet.” You know what those hobbies prove? They prove that you’re human… barely. Everyone likes and does those things, so I don’t care about them. In fact, I don’t care about anything you do outside of the office as long as it isn’t cleaning your gun and stalking me. If you have some sort of extraordinary and relevant volunteer work or hobby that might somehow help with the job then you might want to find a way to weasel it in. Most of the jobs I hire for are technical and somewhat menial, so unless you have a hobby like watching paint dry it probably isn’t going to help much.
Use poor grammar: Okay, sure, most hiring managers and human resources can barely compose a three word email without butchering the English language. Guess what? I was an English major and now it’s my turn to pick on all you people who made fun of me back in college. I regularly read letters with sentence fragments, grammatical errors and just plain old weird language. I once had a person apply for the “data enterer job” where she was qualified because she “maintenance of the intensive data base.” What? Where’s the verb? What’s an intensive data base? And isn’t “data base” really one word? Have multiple people look your resumé over before sending it out. Typos are inevitable, but not catching and fixing them makes it look like you don’t care. We all make misteaks…
Pad your resumé to make it appear more full: If you’re new in the work world I’m okay with that. List some classes you took or change spacing a little bit. List the relevant things that you can, be honest, but don’t just chuck in random bullet points of responsibility. I once had a person who listed three jobs and each of the three jobs listed “Attended meetings,” as a responsibility. I don’t consider that a job responsibility any more than “sat in chair” or “drove to work each day.”
Make your resumé longer than two pages: I don’t care if you’ve had more jobs than Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest combined, your resumé shouldn’t be longer than two pages simply because I don’t have the time or the energy to read a four page resume and try to pick out the important things. I have a two foot stack of other resumés to get through and I probably have one day to do it. A resumé is supposed to show relevant highlights, not everything you’ve ever done to make a buck since grade school.
Use strange fonts, paper or formatting: Please, consider the fact that not everyone likes to read pages of 8 point italicized Script MT Bold text. Consider the fact that most companies use some sort of scanning software that needs clear text and consider the fact that many hiring managers are old farts with bad eyes. I guarantee you won’t impress anyone with clever use of fonts or tabs or shading or highlighting or nice parchment-like paper. Every fourth grader in the nation knows how to change fonts by now. And I’ve never heard someone scream out, “Let’s hire this guy!! He can type on PARCHMENT!!” You know what I think when I see a resumé that isn’t on plain white paper and with a readable font? I think “Oh, that’s eye-catching… and I can’t read it and the person is clearly trying to hide something or has spent too much time hanging around Ren Faires.”
You get the idea. Here’s a good rule of thumb for sending in resumes and cover letters for jobs: Don’t be Stupid.
Sure, every company does hiring a different way and what works for one company may not work for another. But hiring managers are all human (well, maybe not in law offices) and we all pretty much want the same thing: someone who can do the job, who won’t annoy us and who may make our dull, miserable lives a little more enjoyable.
Remember: hiring managers are people, too. If you screw up your resume or cover letter, don’t worry about it too much. It’s not like we’re going to post all your stupid mistakes in some blog and spread it all over the internet or anything…
[tags]resume, hiring, cover letter, job interview, get a job, job application, resumé,Ren Faire[/tags]
12 Responses to “Advice from a Hiring Manager: What NOT To Do In Your Cover Letter and Resumé”
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Dee says:
As a recent graduate who is in the job market for the first time, I’d like to thank you for this post.
I can happily say that I’ve avoided falling into the pitfalls you’ve mentioned, but it is still stressful nonetheless.
June 5th, 2008 at 8:31 pm -
Justin says:
I once had a resumé float across my desk into the trashcan after they berated the existing development team in the cover letter.
It was rather…inappropriate.
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siln_cafe_abroad says:
Lol!!! I’ve seen about as many resumes as cups of coffee and I have thought about writing a similar piece with all the wacky mistakes I have seen over the years.
One that isn’t on your list: I hate it when applicants write relevant info in their cover letter but don’t include it in the resume because they’re afraid of repeating themselves. SO many people don’t even read cover letters. If you’re qualified I’d repeat the qualifications as many times as possible before you sound autistic. Seriously. Sometimes I’d miss a detail or something and roundfile a resume prematurely.
Interestingly I haven’t seen a resume in a while because the company I work for now goes through a recruiting community/market website called Dayak. It’s working out great; we’ve found fantastic people and I no longer have to pour over poorly-written job histories. But I wonder now if recruiters have different resume peeves than managers do? Seems like they see just as many if not more.
Anyway great advice and GREAT post.
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asia says:
you need to edit a sentence:
Remember: you’re future boss will be the one who hires you and think about how stupid you think most bosses are.
you’re should be your
anyway, excellent article!! As someone looks at resumes as well, this pretty much sums it up!
Cheers! -
Tom Coffee says:
Our company just went to an electronic job application system (literally last week) but I haven’t had a chance to use it yet… it will be interesting to see if I even see cover letters anymore…
And, asia, thanks! I have to admit that I love the fact that I wrote an article about being careful with typing mistakes and I make a pretty blatant mistake myself…
Oh well, I guess we all can’t be prefect
-Tom
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Lionel says:
Talk about a perfect balance between valid business points and smacking people who aren’t paying attention in the head.
Bravo! -
Jac says:
How about not putting a watermark across the whole thing? Sure, to you it may look neat on the computer to have a faded “John Doe” in faded letters behind your normal text…but once HR prints out the page and gives it to the person actually reviewing the resumes (if they were not pre-screened BY HR) then it just looks like a massive blotch on the page that not only distracts from the content of your resume but makes it completely illegible. True story too, I just had to laugh at it when I saw it.
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Jacob from JobMob says:
Good list and I like the funny tone.
I actually already covered some of these mistakes and others here:
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simone says:
Thanks for the tips! I’m definitely going to keep this in mind next time that I’m applying for a job
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clare says:
Hi Tom!
I have been reading you for a long time. I just finished my own webpage in a college class and I mentioned you and put a link to you. The webpage above is it. I’m sure the class (and teacher) will enjoy your post on resumes!!
I enjoy your writing SO MUCH, thank you for always making me laught til I cry!!!!!
Clare -
Tom Coffee says:
Clare,
Thanks for the kind words! I have to admit that I was always confused as heck by the name “California University of Pennsylvania” when I was going to college in central PA.
Now that I’m much older I’m still pretty darn confused by it.
Hmm… Anyway, thanks again!
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Dominic Son says:
To use an analogy, finding a job is like the pursuit of a relationship. If a guy were to spit game at every girl that had knees, he’s probably going to catch a nightmare of a lady. Same with jobs, especially as people get desperate and just send out their resumes to everyone. Now what if this guy had the power of the collective to tell him ‘Hey, it’s your charm man! focus on your charm!”. Do you not think he would be an attractor of ladies instead of the other way around?
There’s a site called ResumeRace.com , so that the collective can use their instincts and rate people’s resumes within their fields! That way, more hiring managers like this one here can find them from all the clutter easier!