Hi all,
Its interesting to know how candidates make life difficult for themselves while writing their resumes. Imagine getting applications where the candidate has all the requisite skills and has not mentioned his/her contact information! To me it implies that the candidate does not have a high regard for attention to detail. It also implies that the candidate neither thought before starting the resume writing process nor did (s)/he bother to check for completeness before posting the same online.
Some other interesting observations that I think will help any candidate applying for a job across the world are listed below in the order we discovered them while sorting through the resumes received by us at Infocom 2006 and subsequently after candidates decided to take the challenge on our website and uploaded their resumes.
Some of the common Turn-Offs
- Contact details missing….well, does the candidate feel so sure of rejection!
- Incorrect contact details….duh, it is as bad as the previous one or maybe even worse!
- Just mentioning years of experience without giving any details of the kind of experience…makes me want to know if the candidate feels that his experience is irrelevant to the position being applied for!
- All candidates from an University stating their Dean/Director as a reference…wonder how many candidates will the dean personally know!
- A candidate felt that mentioning the reasons of quitting his previous organization should be part of the resume…I guess, I do not want to hire somebody who wants to talk bad about his past employer in an resume!
- A couple of candidates actually mass emailed their resumes to about 35 different companies and addressed it all to just 1 of them….as you may have guessed, it was not even addressed to my organization, so should I be processing the resume?
- This one takes the cake; I got 1 resume that was typed in all caps…HELLO! ARE YOU SHOUTING AT ME or applying for a job?
- 1 candidate is probably a wannabe model, 50% of the 1st page is his photograph….looks and muscles may be important but I think we are recruiting for brains rather than brawns, or was that pose meant to intimidate me?!
- Another amazing one is from a candidate who has 3 years of experience working on Python 4.2.2 ….hmmm, when did this release!
Wonder what kind of experiences other people have when it comes to sorting through resumes. I would like to expand the above list for the benefit of all candidates, so am looking for contributions from all the readers of the post.
Cheers!
-Abhishek Chamaria
