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…

Technorati Tags: resume, hiring, cover letter, job interview, get a job, job application, resumé, Ren Faire

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Me, as a manager. Nerd Alert: I have a blue lightsaber because I’m still one of the good guys.

There I was several months ago sitting in my cube, not doing much of anything and getting paid rather well for it, when one of the regular “Job Posting” email messages came out from our Human Humor Resources department. Sensing something different, I quickly scanned the email and only found two mispellings and three grammatical errors, which made this one of the most legible messages they’d sent out in a long time.

Reading a little deeper I quickly realized that this was a managerial position which almost seemed to be written for me. The job asked for skills I had, listed people I had worked well with and it didn’t report to my long-time boss and part-time nemesis, Dick Lundberg.

I quickly spent the rest of the day polishing up my resume, being careful not to go too overboard on my accomplishments knowing that someone might, on a whim, actually check. I changed “Found a cure for cancer,” to “Found a probable cure for cancer,” and when I listed how much money I had saved the company with my brilliant ideas I only used eight or nine zeroes.

Remarkably, I was interviewed. Even more remarkably, I got the job.

And, within a span of about three weeks, I went from Tom Coffee: Office Schlub to Tom Coffee: Office Dark Lord of Middle Management.

I’m still working for the same company largely doing the same things I did before, but I no longer have to work on the self-serving plans and directionless projects created by Dick Lundberg. Even more importantly I’m no longer in the Seventh Ring of Hell known as “Information Technology.”

I have an amazing group of minions staff members that work for me, I have a a slightly larger paycheck, slightly more responsibilities and a slightly larger cube. I don’t yet rate an office due to space constraints in our current building, but I’m actively mailing anonymous retirement community brochures to some of the older managers in my area.

I’ve also found that becoming a manager has given me special powers that I never had before. I can put a stop to stupid projects, I can actually influence plans so that they are carried out and I am allowed to talk to Vice Presidents without averting my eyes.

I’m still getting used to my new position but so far my favorite activity has been making obnoxious requests with Emergency Helpdesk Tickets to upgrade my PC to something with more gigahertz, change the color of my databases or run reports that have hundreds of required fields and parameters.

And you can probably guess who gets stuck with most of these requests… I now see Dick Lundberg, my former boss, more than I ever did before.

And I like it.

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The Only Reason To Ever Attend A Business Conference With Your Boss

I am at a business conference with my boss this week, which means that I’m feeling pretty suicidal right now.

Business conferences are 10% truth, 20% lies and 70% beer. Right now my beer-to-blood ratio is the highest it’s been in years thanks to my boss constantly buying rounds at the hotel bar, which is probably the only thing preventing me from stabbing myself in the jugular with a free plastic pen or bludgeoning myself to death with a branded pocket calendar.

The problem I continue to have, besides occasional bouts of sobriety, is that Dick Lundberg, my boss, constantly and consistently believes the lies of these vendors… even when they’re not buying us beer.

I have tried to reprimand my boss about this several times but it usually comes out as: “Okay, I’ll have one more Amstel Light.”

Worse, my boss tends to rate the products of these vendors based entirely on the size of the lies. The more outrageous the claim, the more my boss believes the hype.

This is a serious issue and one which will haunt me for the next 365 days until next year’s annual conference. As soon as we all get home and dry out my boss will begin asking me about pieces of software he saw or some new data reporting package he read about, probably on the side of a free duffle bag.

“Tom, this is a great bag!” he’ll proclaim. “We should really look into this product. It says it will make our software fly! I always wanted to be a pilot…”

“Dick, their software isn’t even released yet. They just had a bunch of PowerPoint slides filled with nonsensical graphs and questionable buzzwords like ‘e-productivity,’ ‘cross-platform interdependent operability,’ and ‘data specialized datamart.’”

“Oh, yeah, that was a good demo. I can’t wait to buy it!”

“Dick, if we get this we’ll have to spend thousands of man hours and form a dozen management committees to convert all our existing data. We can do the same thing with Microsoft Excel.”

“Stop being so negative!”

My pain is compounded by the fact that this conference is centered around a software suite that is hopelessly outdated and clearly the last ditch effort of a dying company. It is an “enterprise” system which means that companies like my own spent too much money on it when they bought it 20 years ago and now they’re trapped into using this vendor until one of us goes out of business.

This dinosaur of a program is really just a tremendous database program which has cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last 15 years and doesn’t even offer a Windows interface yet (They’re claim: “It’s coming next year! Really! Maybe!”).

Windows came out in 1995. We’re now in 2007. Perhaps this company thinks using a mouse is only a passing trend.

Yesterday I attended an hour-long conference session where the show-stopper was…

Are you ready?

A pull-down menu.

This actually got a round of applause from many of the people in the room. My boss was one of those people. At that moment, a part of me died.

Maybe my expectations are too high or maybe I’m just jaded, but I tend to think that expensive enterprise-level software should probably try to keep up with the features found in software that’s 20 years old or made for grade-schoolers. Heck, a lot of grade school students these days could probably program their own drop-down menu.

In honor of this amazingly ground-breaking technology news, I’ve decided to end this entry with an incredible pull-down menu. I call it, “Things I need to do when I get home…”

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