Thursday, September 24, 2009

resumes are funny

I was skimming more resumes today, and I found a couple of tidbits I just had to share.
First, someone listed this under "Activities" at the bottom of his resume:
"Winner of doubles-competition and runner in singles-competition at Company X's yearly Table Tennis competition." [sic]
I think that's supposed to be funny? I hope? But I'm not endeared. I mean, I'd like to hear that you organized the thing, but telling me where you placed? At table tennis? That has to be "funny because it's absurd," right? Please?
Okay, so I guess the next person was using a template. At the top of the resume, I saw this string of nonsense:
123-456-1234 (p) - N/a (f)
This one took me a few minutes, but then I realized that they were trying to indicate "not applicable" for a fax number. Which, I mean, gahh. Template FAIL.
I also realized something about myself when I was going through these. Whenever I saw a gap in someone's resume, I would always scroll to the top to see if the person was female. Like, did she take off because she had a baby?
And then finally, hundreds of resumes later, I realized that I was being sexist. I mean, it's more likely that a woman would take off after having a baby, but it's not impossible that a gap in a man's resume could also be baby-related. Duh.
Later in the day, I found nothing at all amusing, and couldn't wait to run out the door at 5. I'm going to spare you the little stream-of-consciousness rant I wrote then. You can thank me in the comments.

1 comment: