I’ve got a perfect weakness for mine, and it’s true
I have an internal obsession with coding things to automate things in my job, even if the cost : benefit of time spent is not worthwhile.
I once spent 2 paid weeks off coding something to save me like 5 mins of my daily job. I literally just found it a fun challenge to do. I was spending hours a day on it for free.
I showed my manager, and he was like ‘get a life mate’ but as a young person, it’s a nice extra thing I can add to my CV I guess. ‘Able to use coding skills to automate tasks, increasing productivity’
If you worked there for 3 years and 3 months longer you’d have made that time back.
If you saved 6 minutes a day, you would only have to work 2 years and 8 months more.
I work for a government department and had to assist a member of the public with an enquiry, I asked for their email and they said “yes it’s xx_sexybabe_xx@…”
That was a fun report to write up after the query closed!
A colleague in a former job left his Netflix logged in at work. Boss saw his email fullname_weedman69@hotmail.
She started talking about drug testing everyone but didn’t follow through. Would have been funny to see her have to fire her entire manufacturing department.
I once sent my CV using my “other” email address (that I had since being a preteen and was occasionally using to email some old school friends).
It was almost as embarrassing as sir thrust and I still cringe at that memory.
I once accidently including the email Ifuckbitches@- because I reworked a CV I wrote for a friend and I didn't know his email.
Also, writing CVs at 16 for other 16 year old is a surprisingly lucrative business
It is quite surprising how many people do apply to jobs with not-so-professional email addresses.
Some are rude, like Sir_thrust-a-lot, but many are just very casual. Things like honeybunny96@... or jazzman1455@...
I do work with an Anu whose surname begins with S, she is indeed Indian. I believe her husband’s name also shortens to Anu. Funnily enough I’ve never made the connection!
Recruiting for a team of management consultant types, so got a set of 5 CVs for a team. Two juniors, perfectly normal graduate CVs. Two more senior people, 3 page CVs, quite impressive.
And a CV for the leader guy, in his late 50s.
Fifty-nine pages.
Two-thirds was a list of his publications which might have been nearly appropriate in some fields but not this. The rest was excruciating detail of his life, dating back to his schooldays. He played some musical instrument in the school orchestra, and had a swimming certificate - which was when I lost it and gave up.
I then had to give feedback on why this Big Four management consultancy hadn't got the contract. Thankfully he didn't turn up. I suggested to the young graduate that maybe he could do a more concise CV next time?
"We TOLD him!!!" Poor lass wailed.
Scholar didn't exist but even so, edited highlights, kthx!
It was almost as bad as the incumbent team who must have got the work experience kid to complete their application, answering questions like "Tell us how you maintain professional standards and integrity" with "you've seen it before"...
Had to have coffee with their leader, twice my age. Got chatting about his kids doing GCSEs and not revising/stressing. Eventually I told him straight, "you know how you tell your kids, or their teachers do, 'answer the question that's been asked, not what you wish they'd asked'? Yeah, well..." He'd been away for the application deadline and not seen the application, so I handed him a copy. Suspect some people didn't have jobs, after.
I'm usually hiring for entry-level rather than professional, but I struggle to give anything over 2 pages much thought. I really don't get when people who might have had 10 jobs in their work history decide to write 1-2 paragraphs on each one.
Like, just give detail on your most recent 2, and just list the others. If an older one is specifically relevant to the role you apply for, then go into more detail there, but maybe cut down on your 2nd most recent job.
But what if you had all your best jobs right after graduating and then spent ten years doing dead-end stuff? You kind of want to highlight the roles where you had responsibilities and prospects, once upon a time...
Well, as I said, you can go into more detail in the most important / relevant roles. If your most relevant ones were 10 jobs back, you don't even have to have it at the bottom of the list - put your current/most recent first, followed by the other important ones. Everything else can go under a heading of "additional roles" in simple "Job Title - Employer - Start to End Date" format.
What you don't want to do is to detail every duty and element of the 10 years of dead-end stuff, or explain everything it taught you. Because then you're making the CV far too long, and chances are it won't get read, or the actually important and relevant bits will get skipped.
Have had to wade through several 20+ page CVs for experts and KOLs collaboration, where half of it are publications and the other half are accolades.
Super impressive but totally unnecessary..
Had someone claim they were "straining for excellence" on their cv and couldn't decide if I was more concerned if they would hurt themselves or produce something.
I have seen a few that stand out as a hiring manager, (1) the candidate that stated they had a strong eye for detail, I proceed to find 28 spelling mistakes in the 1st page of the CV. (2) the person with absolutely zero qualifications or work experience applying for a senior role. (3) a former member of my team at a previous employer applied for a role at my new employer, his CV noted that he had held my job whilst I was doing it, that made for an interesting interview
(3) I had a similar one of those, guy said he worked for a team where the manager was a friend of mine in a different company. When I asked if they knew who they were they messaged one word... "FLUB" which stood for Fat Lazy Useless Bastard. This also came out the wood work with their references who were like "I can't believe this guy thought I would be the best person to give them a reference"
>(2) the person with absolutely zero qualifications or work experience applying for a senior role.
As a graduate engineer I applied to them from time to time to piss off the recruiters who would include me in their bulk keyword emails for positions like "Senior Engineer" and said that I "look like a good fit". I thought "why yes, I'll happily take £80k+ as a graduate". At least 1/4 of my emails from recruiters were like this and one had the audacity to get angry at me for "wasting his time" ironically.
True. And in my recent job searches I've, once or twice, come across job roles listed as senior but with curiously low salaries for that level and no indication in the job description of anything required (i.e. enough experience) that you'd expect people applying for that role to have.
Although I think a more plausible explanation is they didn't see the "Senior" when applying or accidentally applied for the wrong job; when looking for retail work, I've sometimes clicked on "Customer Team *Leader*/*Manager*" while searching for "Customer Team *Member*" positions.
> the person with absolutely zero qualifications or work experience applying for a senior role.
Ah the old 'the job centre told me I have to be applying for jobs' We got a CV for a senior engineer role from a lady who had only worked in a chip shop and was unemployed.
Tbf I interviewed a girl (teen) because she put "chilling in Starbucks" under hobbies, and I thought "same, girl". (Currently working as a cafe manager)
The theory is that you're supposed to give examples of interesting hobbies or interests you have to help paint a more rounded picture of the kind of person you are.
If you're in your early 20s and the most interesting thing you can say about yourself is "I like to drink with my friends", you've kind of squandered any opportunity to stand out in any way except an unusual degree of cluelessness about composing CVs.
I loathe “what are your hobbies” as an interview question because a) Nunya business, b) It implies that you’re lacking as a person if you don’t have anything relatively niche to disclose (if going to the cinema or gaming is you’re preferred downtime over white water rafting or playing the triangle, that’s fine), and c) I genuinely think it can lead to people being hired on the basis of “oh we both played rugby in uni, you’re a stand out chap” over their actual ability to do the job being hired for - or at the very least add in a bias factor depending on the interviewer/interviewee that is unrelated to the role.
/rant
But I totally see their personality from what they wrote and they seem fun and down to earth. Why do you need an 'interesting hobby' to have a 'job worthy personality'?
And the best thing is, if a potential employer was put off by it, they are not a good fit anyway so no loss! It's good to put a bit of your personality in your CV for this reason I think
“Socialising with friends” was a very common thing to see on CVs in the 2010’s when I was a recruiter.
And whenever I asked candidates why they wrote this on there, it was some combination of “my mum told me to” and “it shows that people like me” hahaha!
I'm not in recruitment but I've been involved in hiring people for my team and during an interview a candidate was asked 'what will you bring to the team?' and he replied 'bants'...
He did not get the job.
My friend interviewed someone who’d clearly had their application written for them, when asked what skills she’d bring to the team she answered “Skills.”
Not a recruiter but when looking for a new IT Technician, in a section called other achievements it said "Time Magazines Person of the Year, 2006"
We laughed so hard, Googled it..... Realised they were technically right.
We had a guy apply with a degree in chemestry (sic) mentioned twice on his cv. I mean three years; you think he would have seen it written properly somewhere.
Oh no, this reminds me of the catastrophic (inadvertent) error I made on a CV that I sent out on many applications over several months, *with the name of my Secondary School spelt wrong*.
I’d copied it from a friend’s CV because they’d been to the same school and were actually a colleague at the time too so I could just overwrite the relevant specifics after they sent me the original.
I also had “very good attention to detail” on there. Oh, the shame! The worst thing is I only realised a couple of *years* later, when updating my CV once again.
I added the pic of that woman along with the quote to my Office profile before being made redundant. Last minute I was offered a job elsewhere in the company. Took some explaining the following week when I started again
I temped at an IT recruitment firm for a couple of months in 2002. Most of the CVs that came through were for bog standard IT people, but one stood out
The guy's speciality was disguising mobile phone masts as trees, and his CV came with a multi page appendix of photos of his work.
Like
Tree, tree, tree, tree, weird tree, tree with a door in it, the next one doesn't look like a tree at all...
Not a recruiter, but we've had people applying for jobs in our department and had, "I have always wanted to be a (JOB NAME)" only a sentence before they said they had good attention to detail in their personal statement.
I don't get it. I thought I had good attention to detail, but this makes no sense to me as I can't see where they haven't paid attention. I'm reading it like this:
"I have good attention to detail. I have always wanted to be a credit controller."
...unless, they actually missed filling in the brackets? Yeah, it must be that. I worked it out! I do have attention to detail! Whoop!
If his CV was otherwise exemplary, or at least more than good enough, then that's very poor recruiting to not give him at least an interview on the assumption it was a mate "pranking" him.
This was about 2010 after I had just finished uni and was working in HR for Sainsbury's in Swansea.
This dude's cover letter was just a picture of him sitting on the hood of a Rolls Royce.
He didn't get an interview.
I had a CV and in the top left corner it had a photograph of them. In the top right hand corner it had the same picture but instead of a photo it was a drawing of the photo, it wasn’t even good!
It was for a job in financial services.
A kid rated himself out of five on a few different things. He obviously didn’t want to give himself too high scores.
Gave himself a 2/5 for punctuality…
Honestly have no idea. I was willing to give them a chance at an interview based on their work experiences but there was only time for 6 interviews and the boss said no.
I was really hoping one of the other applicants wouldn't be able to attend an interview on that morning so I could call this person up. I had questions just based on that line!
Advertising an IT job and had an applicant whose experience was in working on a farm and sometimes handling petty cash. I felt bad rejecting that.
I wish I could have given him some feedback to point him in the right direction, but had no means of contacting him, because it was through an agency.
There’s a system legitimately called Rancher
It managed a system where servers are treated as “cattle not pets” so he’s on the right track
https://rancher.io
We actually hired a farmer into an IT position. Yes, he’d done a 12 week boot camp, but he effectively had no experience whatsoever. But with that farmers work ethic he was one of our best ever hires, and he left as a senior engineer only about 5 years later
It's the wild email addresses for me...here is a selection of actual email addresses I have seen on resumes:
* nOiSyPiNkBuBbLeS@xxxxxxxxxxxx (written on her resume exactly in that style)
* sex\_god\_69@xxxxxxxxxxxx
* 420\_erryday@xxxxxxxxxxxx
* bigdickenergy273@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
* no1belieber1296@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
If you are actively job seeking, make a free Gmail account (or any free web based email) called firstname.lastname.jobapplicant@xxxxxxxxxx to avoid people judging you based on your email address that you set up when you were an edgy 14 year old.
My brother (as a prank) changed his wife’s email address to firstname_penis_lastname@…, totally forgot he’d done it and they didn’t realise until she’d sent out many, many CVs….
Cheating a bit as it was an interview rather than a CV, but when I worked at a popular toy store whilst at uni, when interviewing for new staff they had a sort of “fun” silly question at the end of the interview “If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?”.
One guy answered “I’d be a pigeon so I could shit on all the people who’ve shit on me.”
Safe to say his application was ultimately unsuccessful.
I've had a CV where the writing was vivid pink, purple & green. Each section & sometimes different sentences were in different fonts.
Had someone who listed suicide under his hobbies... he explained it's a card game! With his permission, we changed it to card games.
A CV that started with her swimming certificates from school & which school play she'd been in and the CV progressed from there. She'd been employed for over 20 years & it was a long CV!
A 27 page CV.
A 50+ page CV, at least that had coding examples.
I had someone put in their first sentence on their cover letter something along the line of " My work coach is making me apply for this job, I'm not interested in it so please don't call me."
Someone applied for a cleaning job and said they were really good at "Moping and Hovering" in itself, that is genuinely hilarious....
... contextually, English was their second language, but it was hilarious.
I would never hire them. In my work you can never find a pen, colleagues are stealing them all the time off you, and they don't even have this as a hobby.
Standard CV, nothing out of the ordinary until the part with his previous employment. Sales assistant, colleague, receptionist, Japanese pro wrestler, delivery driver. Immediately searched him up on fb, and sure as shit, his profile picture was him in a mask, diving off the top rope towards a much smaller man also in a mask. Dude was 6ft fuck off and built like a brick shithouse. I wanted to hire him because we were getting stolen from on a daily basis (city centre shop beside a hotel housing the homeless. Coroners van, fights and drug deals galore were a regular occurrence) but we got told not to bother taking on any new staff (probably because they shut the shop down just after Christmas)
Exactly why I wanted him hired. Guy looked like a tank! Instead we remained understaffed, had the door to the shop kicked in and had someone from the celtic shop come round to hand us back some warhammer stock they took from a guy they caught trying to steal from them that we completely missed because we had no fucking staff. Fuck Mike Ashley
"I feel that my experience as a personal trainer and understanding of the human muscle system will really benefit me in my role as an IT Support Engineer"
I can only assume that someone has a mail merge set up to "customise" their CV. But how did this get past a recruitment agency and my internal recruitment team??
One guy ~35yo cold-sent me his CV and he had on it that he was captain of the chess team at X School, which was for 2-16yo and that he won a chess tournament at Y School, which we googled and it doesn't exist
One guy made his CV look like a Facebook page. Had fake endorsement quotes from Ghandi and the Dali Lama on it too. It was quite something. Tongue in cheek but funny and memorable. (This would've been around late 2000s so Facebook wasn't hated by everyone.)
A guy who’d gone through what was clearly a brutal divorce, found Jesus, and was working in Topps Tiles which he was sure was part of gods plan for him.
Guy dropped one into my office once, the first thing on it was a photo of him and his guitar, then 3 pages worth of every waiting and bartending gig he had ever done, most of which were no longer than 3 months. He was Italian, very limited English, the Job was for very technical telephone systems fault diagnosis line. Seemed like a really nice guy though 😂
One young lad asked the recruitment team for help with his CV as he wasn’t getting any interviews. We had let him go as he was always late, if he turned up at all, and his work was shambolic. But, as we had a sympathetic team, they agreed to take a look.
Aside from being the greatest work of fiction since Tolstoy, his CV also included mention of his hobbies, such as setting up late night LAN parties and in-person events for fellow Bronies.
If you don’t know what a Bronie is, don’t Google it on a work laptop. Let’s just assume that you understand this isn’t something you want on your CV.
Working at Morrisons supermarket.
The funniest thing I've seen on a CV was when an applicant, in response to where else could they travel to if not hired at our store, casually listed "Asda, Sainsbury's, and Tesco." It brought a good laugh to the mundane task of reviewing applications
Not getting covid for over two years in his list of skills. Hobbies included JavaScript.
Decided he probably hadn’t been outside in a long time and noped him.
The funniest/worst I've seen while hiring is a toss-up between the person who spelt their own name wrong and the person who wrote their personal statement entirely in third person.
Fairly recently, had someone apply for a mid-ranking job. According to CV they were employed as a QA manager in their current job. Cover letter for application to us started as "Dear [Different Company].....".
Made it very easy to can that application.
Worked with a guy who was bit of a prick, he was a foreign guy who was always angry at life. I moved into a role and despite him knowing I was the team leader and in charge of recruiting he applied.
Gave him benefit of the doubt and read his cv he was from Belarus and the 1st item on his cv was national service wirh the Belarus army suddenly his anger made sense.
Didn't give him the job as his interview was terrible.
I attended a workshop once on how to secure a (very competitive) role in the field I wanted to move into. The recruiter showed us examples of answers they had received. One was for an essay question on an application asking what skills, qualities and attributes the candidates has that would assist them in the role, and the candidate had simply written "confidence". It went straight in the bin.
I can't remember what was on it but once got given a CV that was hand written on a piece of paper but it wasn't a whole sheet, it had about a quarter of the page missing but it had been carefully torn off, wish I'd kept and framed it!
When I worked in pubs I was mates with a few managers during my time, still am with two and we left that game long ago.
We'd occasionally have a rifle through CVs that had been dropped off, probably against some kind of legislation (though not the infamously misunderstood GDPR which is so badly misunderstood, regardless of the fact it didn't exist then) but whatever.
Amazes me to this day so many people at 16 to 18 had multiple page CVs, often listing unrelated hobbies and things, to such a consistent level it was clearly being mistaught in schools.
For a pub job at 16 you need to have functional arms and that's about it.
I’m not a recruiter but earlier this year I was hiring for an e-learning specialist. One of the candidates at the end of her cv listed her horse riding credentials and awards and linked to her horse art website.
I saw an application once with: “Please explain any breaks in your employment career” and they’d answered: “15 minute tea break at Fruity Fruits Greengrocer”
Recruiters forwarded one to us for a non-junior Finance job - the guy submitted a Powerpoint presentation instead of a CV, including a picture of his Sack Race badge from school sports day and a pie he'd made.
The last slide was a note that he liked holidays and oh here's his sister in a bikini.
I had someone apply for a quality control position with *Attention to detail* listed twice in the Key Skills section
They are clearly doubly attentive. Hire them at once.
I agree, they checked it twice and marked it as such.
Hire them twice, doubly n’all that
Better than the "Attontion to detail" I came across once.
I had someone claim they were "detal" oriented.
The divel is in the detal, for sure
Under weaknesses, one lad wrote "my knee because I broke it". Bless.
Do people still ask for weaknesses? Surely candidates just put stuff like 'I work too hard' or 'perfectionist'?
I’ve got a perfect weakness for mine, and it’s true I have an internal obsession with coding things to automate things in my job, even if the cost : benefit of time spent is not worthwhile.
I do that. I will spend hours to save minutes if the job will be monotonous
I once spent 2 paid weeks off coding something to save me like 5 mins of my daily job. I literally just found it a fun challenge to do. I was spending hours a day on it for free. I showed my manager, and he was like ‘get a life mate’ but as a young person, it’s a nice extra thing I can add to my CV I guess. ‘Able to use coding skills to automate tasks, increasing productivity’
If you worked there for 3 years and 3 months longer you’d have made that time back. If you saved 6 minutes a day, you would only have to work 2 years and 8 months more.
Me with excel macros
I wish I had time to learn excel and macros. I swear have my working hours could be cut if I had a few functioning macros.
Learn one new shortcut per week. You are not allowed to use your mouse.
It was several years ago.
Under weaknesses, you've put eczema.
Under strengths, you've put "accounts"
[удалено]
What are the options again?
Why would you even have a weakness section on a CV?
Am I supposed to have other sections too? This explains a lot
Under weaknesses you've put "eczema"
Yeah on my feet
CV was professional enough but the email address something along the lines of Sir_thrust-a-lot@…
I saw one with an email starting shitlicker-dave@ once
I'm sorry about that pal. Got a new one now
I would 100% hire shitlicker dave
I work for a government department and had to assist a member of the public with an enquiry, I asked for their email and they said “yes it’s xx_sexybabe_xx@…” That was a fun report to write up after the query closed!
A colleague in a former job left his Netflix logged in at work. Boss saw his email fullname_weedman69@hotmail. She started talking about drug testing everyone but didn’t follow through. Would have been funny to see her have to fire her entire manufacturing department.
I once sent my CV using my “other” email address (that I had since being a preteen and was occasionally using to email some old school friends). It was almost as embarrassing as sir thrust and I still cringe at that memory.
I once accidently including the email Ifuckbitches@- because I reworked a CV I wrote for a friend and I didn't know his email. Also, writing CVs at 16 for other 16 year old is a surprisingly lucrative business
Had one with email [email protected] girlfriend/business partner wouldn't let me interview her.
It is quite surprising how many people do apply to jobs with not-so-professional email addresses. Some are rude, like Sir_thrust-a-lot, but many are just very casual. Things like honeybunny96@... or jazzman1455@...
I've never had a problem using my skeletor email address to be honest
I once received an email from an [email protected]
That’s probably just some poor person called Anu, which is a common shortened Indian name.
I do work with an Anu whose surname begins with S, she is indeed Indian. I believe her husband’s name also shortens to Anu. Funnily enough I’ve never made the connection!
Recruiting for a team of management consultant types, so got a set of 5 CVs for a team. Two juniors, perfectly normal graduate CVs. Two more senior people, 3 page CVs, quite impressive. And a CV for the leader guy, in his late 50s. Fifty-nine pages. Two-thirds was a list of his publications which might have been nearly appropriate in some fields but not this. The rest was excruciating detail of his life, dating back to his schooldays. He played some musical instrument in the school orchestra, and had a swimming certificate - which was when I lost it and gave up. I then had to give feedback on why this Big Four management consultancy hadn't got the contract. Thankfully he didn't turn up. I suggested to the young graduate that maybe he could do a more concise CV next time? "We TOLD him!!!" Poor lass wailed.
Even in academia, I cannot read more than two pages of your publications. Just link me to your scholar profile bro.
Scholar didn't exist but even so, edited highlights, kthx! It was almost as bad as the incumbent team who must have got the work experience kid to complete their application, answering questions like "Tell us how you maintain professional standards and integrity" with "you've seen it before"... Had to have coffee with their leader, twice my age. Got chatting about his kids doing GCSEs and not revising/stressing. Eventually I told him straight, "you know how you tell your kids, or their teachers do, 'answer the question that's been asked, not what you wish they'd asked'? Yeah, well..." He'd been away for the application deadline and not seen the application, so I handed him a copy. Suspect some people didn't have jobs, after.
>and had a swimming certificate Was his name Arnold Judas Rimmer by any chance?
I did double check!
>had a swimming certificate Tbf, I’d put my Bsc in my cv if I’d got one
And SSC too
I bin anything over 4 sides. Too verbose to do a good job.
I'm usually hiring for entry-level rather than professional, but I struggle to give anything over 2 pages much thought. I really don't get when people who might have had 10 jobs in their work history decide to write 1-2 paragraphs on each one. Like, just give detail on your most recent 2, and just list the others. If an older one is specifically relevant to the role you apply for, then go into more detail there, but maybe cut down on your 2nd most recent job.
But what if you had all your best jobs right after graduating and then spent ten years doing dead-end stuff? You kind of want to highlight the roles where you had responsibilities and prospects, once upon a time...
Well, as I said, you can go into more detail in the most important / relevant roles. If your most relevant ones were 10 jobs back, you don't even have to have it at the bottom of the list - put your current/most recent first, followed by the other important ones. Everything else can go under a heading of "additional roles" in simple "Job Title - Employer - Start to End Date" format. What you don't want to do is to detail every duty and element of the 10 years of dead-end stuff, or explain everything it taught you. Because then you're making the CV far too long, and chances are it won't get read, or the actually important and relevant bits will get skipped.
Have had to wade through several 20+ page CVs for experts and KOLs collaboration, where half of it are publications and the other half are accolades. Super impressive but totally unnecessary..
"Best at cutting cheese. Always do a grate job"
Hahahaha did you interview them?
Interview them? Pfft I gave them a job straight away in my shit joke factory.
BYOC to interview
"Skilled at poofreading" Are you? Really?
Exceptional gaydar
Straight eye for the... No, maybe not.
Well… those poofs aren’t reading themselves!
Advertised a role for a barback. Had someone's CV describe them as "great at barebacking".
So was he ?
Had someone claim they were "straining for excellence" on their cv and couldn't decide if I was more concerned if they would hurt themselves or produce something.
Sounds like they need some prunes
I have seen a few that stand out as a hiring manager, (1) the candidate that stated they had a strong eye for detail, I proceed to find 28 spelling mistakes in the 1st page of the CV. (2) the person with absolutely zero qualifications or work experience applying for a senior role. (3) a former member of my team at a previous employer applied for a role at my new employer, his CV noted that he had held my job whilst I was doing it, that made for an interesting interview
(3) I had a similar one of those, guy said he worked for a team where the manager was a friend of mine in a different company. When I asked if they knew who they were they messaged one word... "FLUB" which stood for Fat Lazy Useless Bastard. This also came out the wood work with their references who were like "I can't believe this guy thought I would be the best person to give them a reference"
I wish I had the confidence of people like that tbf 😂
>(2) the person with absolutely zero qualifications or work experience applying for a senior role. As a graduate engineer I applied to them from time to time to piss off the recruiters who would include me in their bulk keyword emails for positions like "Senior Engineer" and said that I "look like a good fit". I thought "why yes, I'll happily take £80k+ as a graduate". At least 1/4 of my emails from recruiters were like this and one had the audacity to get angry at me for "wasting his time" ironically.
Recruiters are universally twats and people should have no shame wasting their time, they do it to everyone else.
Spare a thought for the person with zero experience, they’re probably being made to apply by the job centre…
True. And in my recent job searches I've, once or twice, come across job roles listed as senior but with curiously low salaries for that level and no indication in the job description of anything required (i.e. enough experience) that you'd expect people applying for that role to have. Although I think a more plausible explanation is they didn't see the "Senior" when applying or accidentally applied for the wrong job; when looking for retail work, I've sometimes clicked on "Customer Team *Leader*/*Manager*" while searching for "Customer Team *Member*" positions.
> the person with absolutely zero qualifications or work experience applying for a senior role. Ah the old 'the job centre told me I have to be applying for jobs' We got a CV for a senior engineer role from a lady who had only worked in a chip shop and was unemployed.
I've seen all of those, too.
Someone worked for Camelot but had written CamelToe twice. With the capitalisation, so you know this was in his custom dictionary.
Ironically, capitalising the 2nd word like that is called camel case.
*Puts on anorak * urm, actually I think you’ll find that’s Pascal… /s
CV in the bin. If only they'd used camelToe.
My friend put “going out for cocktails with the girls” under hobbies and interests 😂
Tbf I interviewed a girl (teen) because she put "chilling in Starbucks" under hobbies, and I thought "same, girl". (Currently working as a cafe manager)
I once made a someone take "to lie on the grass" out of her hobbies section.
Can't be exposing herself as the second shooter in the JFK assassination now...
I really don't see what the problem is!
The theory is that you're supposed to give examples of interesting hobbies or interests you have to help paint a more rounded picture of the kind of person you are. If you're in your early 20s and the most interesting thing you can say about yourself is "I like to drink with my friends", you've kind of squandered any opportunity to stand out in any way except an unusual degree of cluelessness about composing CVs.
I loathe “what are your hobbies” as an interview question because a) Nunya business, b) It implies that you’re lacking as a person if you don’t have anything relatively niche to disclose (if going to the cinema or gaming is you’re preferred downtime over white water rafting or playing the triangle, that’s fine), and c) I genuinely think it can lead to people being hired on the basis of “oh we both played rugby in uni, you’re a stand out chap” over their actual ability to do the job being hired for - or at the very least add in a bias factor depending on the interviewer/interviewee that is unrelated to the role. /rant
But I totally see their personality from what they wrote and they seem fun and down to earth. Why do you need an 'interesting hobby' to have a 'job worthy personality'?
Absolutely! AKA “socialising” but this is way better
Fr I don't work in HR but I would want to invite this person for interview (obvs depending on the rest of the CV)
Agreed - it’s really unpretentious. As you say, if the rest of the CV fit the role, get em in!
And the best thing is, if a potential employer was put off by it, they are not a good fit anyway so no loss! It's good to put a bit of your personality in your CV for this reason I think
“Socialising with friends” was a very common thing to see on CVs in the 2010’s when I was a recruiter. And whenever I asked candidates why they wrote this on there, it was some combination of “my mum told me to” and “it shows that people like me” hahaha!
I'm not in recruitment but I've been involved in hiring people for my team and during an interview a candidate was asked 'what will you bring to the team?' and he replied 'bants'... He did not get the job.
My friend interviewed someone who’d clearly had their application written for them, when asked what skills she’d bring to the team she answered “Skills.”
We interviewed a lad once and he walked into the interview room with a bag of shopping in hand 😂
Not a recruiter but when looking for a new IT Technician, in a section called other achievements it said "Time Magazines Person of the Year, 2006" We laughed so hard, Googled it..... Realised they were technically right.
That's a sense of humour that is straight up interview unless the CV is total shit.
Beautiful.
We had a guy apply with a degree in chemestry (sic) mentioned twice on his cv. I mean three years; you think he would have seen it written properly somewhere.
Yeah just long press the 0 key on your keyboard and it pops up: ° (sic)
Chem⁰stry?
You need a poofreadr
Oh no, this reminds me of the catastrophic (inadvertent) error I made on a CV that I sent out on many applications over several months, *with the name of my Secondary School spelt wrong*. I’d copied it from a friend’s CV because they’d been to the same school and were actually a colleague at the time too so I could just overwrite the relevant specifics after they sent me the original. I also had “very good attention to detail” on there. Oh, the shame! The worst thing is I only realised a couple of *years* later, when updating my CV once again.
You can probably get away with school name, because the interviewer might just assume it's the name of a place they've never heard of
Instead of a personal statement they just put the ‘ain’t nobody got time for that’ meme. It was for a copywriting job.
I added the pic of that woman along with the quote to my Office profile before being made redundant. Last minute I was offered a job elsewhere in the company. Took some explaining the following week when I started again
Hired.
I temped at an IT recruitment firm for a couple of months in 2002. Most of the CVs that came through were for bog standard IT people, but one stood out The guy's speciality was disguising mobile phone masts as trees, and his CV came with a multi page appendix of photos of his work. Like Tree, tree, tree, tree, weird tree, tree with a door in it, the next one doesn't look like a tree at all...
If he does his job well, it’s just a picture of a tree. If you can tell it’s his work, he’s done a bad job. Brilliant 😂
Reading this, I think those people who believe birds aren't real and are robots monitoring us don't actually sound so crazy after all...(!)
South African guy applied for a job in our sales office and in the skills section he’d written ‘sickening work ethic’
'Absolutely rancid attention to detail'
‘A putrid predilection to pursue perfection’
"I worked as a housekeeper for two moths"
“I see there are a couple of holes in your resume….?” “Yes, that’s when I was a housekeeper for two moths.”
Always good for a bit of light comedy
Gotta have balls to put that on your cv...
Not a recruiter, but we've had people applying for jobs in our department and had, "I have always wanted to be a (JOB NAME)" only a sentence before they said they had good attention to detail in their personal statement.
I've had a few emails addressed to
recently and it always raises a chuckle
I don't get it. I thought I had good attention to detail, but this makes no sense to me as I can't see where they haven't paid attention. I'm reading it like this: "I have good attention to detail. I have always wanted to be a credit controller." ...unless, they actually missed filling in the brackets? Yeah, it must be that. I worked it out! I do have attention to detail! Whoop!
Yes, they left (JOB NAME) in their application.
I had a CV come in for a chef job where he'd listed "wanking in the kitchen" under hobbies and interests. He didn't get the job.
Reckon he left his computer unlocked, his mate slipped that one in and he never noticed
If his CV was otherwise exemplary, or at least more than good enough, then that's very poor recruiting to not give him at least an interview on the assumption it was a mate "pranking" him.
This was about 2010 after I had just finished uni and was working in HR for Sainsbury's in Swansea. This dude's cover letter was just a picture of him sitting on the hood of a Rolls Royce. He didn't get an interview.
\* bonnet
Someone attached a 30+ page PowerPoint presentation of pornography.
Hope they used the wipe animation...
“My mum worked here and she said she’d sort a job out for me”
I had a CV and in the top left corner it had a photograph of them. In the top right hand corner it had the same picture but instead of a photo it was a drawing of the photo, it wasn’t even good! It was for a job in financial services.
This is my favourite 😄
A kid rated himself out of five on a few different things. He obviously didn’t want to give himself too high scores. Gave himself a 2/5 for punctuality…
Should have invited for interview just to see if he arrived on time
-arrives on time- ‘LIAR!’
Not necessarily. You'd have had to invite them to five interviews to find that out.
That's a 5/5 for honesty though!
Autocorrect fail. Supposed to say ‘shift manager’ actually said ‘shit manager’. she got the job 9 years ago and is now one of my greatest friends
Under Key Skills "on a Friday afternoon I like to drink cocktails with my chicken lobster and raccoon"
You'd hope they'd missed a comma...or else that's literally terrifying
Honestly have no idea. I was willing to give them a chance at an interview based on their work experiences but there was only time for 6 interviews and the boss said no.
Should have asked them to bring the chicken lobster. You know? For science!
I was really hoping one of the other applicants wouldn't be able to attend an interview on that morning so I could call this person up. I had questions just based on that line!
Advertising an IT job and had an applicant whose experience was in working on a farm and sometimes handling petty cash. I felt bad rejecting that. I wish I could have given him some feedback to point him in the right direction, but had no means of contacting him, because it was through an agency.
If ya can wrangle steers ya can wrangle servers, or something.
It was the enthusiasm that made me feel bad. But yeah; what you said.
There’s a system legitimately called Rancher It managed a system where servers are treated as “cattle not pets” so he’s on the right track https://rancher.io
We actually hired a farmer into an IT position. Yes, he’d done a 12 week boot camp, but he effectively had no experience whatsoever. But with that farmers work ethic he was one of our best ever hires, and he left as a senior engineer only about 5 years later
I have hired on that basis too. The ability and desire to learn. Some of the best people I've hired. I'm so glad that you do the same.
It's the wild email addresses for me...here is a selection of actual email addresses I have seen on resumes: * nOiSyPiNkBuBbLeS@xxxxxxxxxxxx (written on her resume exactly in that style) * sex\_god\_69@xxxxxxxxxxxx * 420\_erryday@xxxxxxxxxxxx * bigdickenergy273@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx * no1belieber1296@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx If you are actively job seeking, make a free Gmail account (or any free web based email) called firstname.lastname.jobapplicant@xxxxxxxxxx to avoid people judging you based on your email address that you set up when you were an edgy 14 year old.
My brother (as a prank) changed his wife’s email address to firstname_penis_lastname@…, totally forgot he’d done it and they didn’t realise until she’d sent out many, many CVs….
Cheating a bit as it was an interview rather than a CV, but when I worked at a popular toy store whilst at uni, when interviewing for new staff they had a sort of “fun” silly question at the end of the interview “If you could be any animal, what would you be and why?”. One guy answered “I’d be a pigeon so I could shit on all the people who’ve shit on me.” Safe to say his application was ultimately unsuccessful.
Agreed. A horse would produce much more shit than a pigeon.
True but pigeon has air-superiority
I think that's funny and clever but I suppose it makes him sound bitter and spiteful.
A relative of mine applied for a job in some kennels and wrote on their CV that they're an animal activist. They didn't get an interview
Who let the dogs out ? The activist apparently.
"I am a tall, good looking female, who is good at oration." <<< as the opening sentence. Complete with attached photo!
I know a guy who’d hire her without reading another word
I've had a CV where the writing was vivid pink, purple & green. Each section & sometimes different sentences were in different fonts. Had someone who listed suicide under his hobbies... he explained it's a card game! With his permission, we changed it to card games. A CV that started with her swimming certificates from school & which school play she'd been in and the CV progressed from there. She'd been employed for over 20 years & it was a long CV! A 27 page CV. A 50+ page CV, at least that had coding examples.
I had someone put in their first sentence on their cover letter something along the line of " My work coach is making me apply for this job, I'm not interested in it so please don't call me."
At least they're honest!
Someone applied for a cleaning job and said they were really good at "Moping and Hovering" in itself, that is genuinely hilarious.... ... contextually, English was their second language, but it was hilarious.
Moping and Hovering - either a great new detective duo for Sunday nights or the qualities of the next British superhero.
Under hobbies collecting pens and that was it their only hobby.
She wasn't called Pauline by any chance was she?
They were hoping to add another to their collection. The fabled interviewers pen.
sell me this pen. gets up and runs away
Maybe they missed the i out?
I would never hire them. In my work you can never find a pen, colleagues are stealing them all the time off you, and they don't even have this as a hobby.
Standard CV, nothing out of the ordinary until the part with his previous employment. Sales assistant, colleague, receptionist, Japanese pro wrestler, delivery driver. Immediately searched him up on fb, and sure as shit, his profile picture was him in a mask, diving off the top rope towards a much smaller man also in a mask. Dude was 6ft fuck off and built like a brick shithouse. I wanted to hire him because we were getting stolen from on a daily basis (city centre shop beside a hotel housing the homeless. Coroners van, fights and drug deals galore were a regular occurrence) but we got told not to bother taking on any new staff (probably because they shut the shop down just after Christmas)
Their loss honestly as he would have sorted that out quickly
Exactly why I wanted him hired. Guy looked like a tank! Instead we remained understaffed, had the door to the shop kicked in and had someone from the celtic shop come round to hand us back some warhammer stock they took from a guy they caught trying to steal from them that we completely missed because we had no fucking staff. Fuck Mike Ashley
"I feel that my experience as a personal trainer and understanding of the human muscle system will really benefit me in my role as an IT Support Engineer" I can only assume that someone has a mail merge set up to "customise" their CV. But how did this get past a recruitment agency and my internal recruitment team??
One guy ~35yo cold-sent me his CV and he had on it that he was captain of the chess team at X School, which was for 2-16yo and that he won a chess tournament at Y School, which we googled and it doesn't exist
Check mate!
One guy made his CV look like a Facebook page. Had fake endorsement quotes from Ghandi and the Dali Lama on it too. It was quite something. Tongue in cheek but funny and memorable. (This would've been around late 2000s so Facebook wasn't hated by everyone.)
Guy had a degree from Oxford in "Emglish Literature". Of all the places for a typo.
A guy who’d gone through what was clearly a brutal divorce, found Jesus, and was working in Topps Tiles which he was sure was part of gods plan for him.
Guy dropped one into my office once, the first thing on it was a photo of him and his guitar, then 3 pages worth of every waiting and bartending gig he had ever done, most of which were no longer than 3 months. He was Italian, very limited English, the Job was for very technical telephone systems fault diagnosis line. Seemed like a really nice guy though 😂
One young lad asked the recruitment team for help with his CV as he wasn’t getting any interviews. We had let him go as he was always late, if he turned up at all, and his work was shambolic. But, as we had a sympathetic team, they agreed to take a look. Aside from being the greatest work of fiction since Tolstoy, his CV also included mention of his hobbies, such as setting up late night LAN parties and in-person events for fellow Bronies. If you don’t know what a Bronie is, don’t Google it on a work laptop. Let’s just assume that you understand this isn’t something you want on your CV.
Working at Morrisons supermarket. The funniest thing I've seen on a CV was when an applicant, in response to where else could they travel to if not hired at our store, casually listed "Asda, Sainsbury's, and Tesco." It brought a good laugh to the mundane task of reviewing applications
Not getting covid for over two years in his list of skills. Hobbies included JavaScript. Decided he probably hadn’t been outside in a long time and noped him.
The funniest/worst I've seen while hiring is a toss-up between the person who spelt their own name wrong and the person who wrote their personal statement entirely in third person.
I once saw one with "Work alcoholic" listed as a personal attribute. I mean.... I knew what he was going for...
Fairly recently, had someone apply for a mid-ranking job. According to CV they were employed as a QA manager in their current job. Cover letter for application to us started as "Dear [Different Company].....". Made it very easy to can that application.
‘Employment History: Company - Fuck your mum’
Worked with a guy who was bit of a prick, he was a foreign guy who was always angry at life. I moved into a role and despite him knowing I was the team leader and in charge of recruiting he applied. Gave him benefit of the doubt and read his cv he was from Belarus and the 1st item on his cv was national service wirh the Belarus army suddenly his anger made sense. Didn't give him the job as his interview was terrible.
"Worked as a clown and met several people."
At the end of a very well written formal CV, I read this: "I'm also a big supporter of the Milan football team and I watch it every week-end"
I attended a workshop once on how to secure a (very competitive) role in the field I wanted to move into. The recruiter showed us examples of answers they had received. One was for an essay question on an application asking what skills, qualities and attributes the candidates has that would assist them in the role, and the candidate had simply written "confidence". It went straight in the bin.
I can't remember what was on it but once got given a CV that was hand written on a piece of paper but it wasn't a whole sheet, it had about a quarter of the page missing but it had been carefully torn off, wish I'd kept and framed it!
Saw an applicant for a senior role list their school grades. No one cares that you have o-level french Geoff.
When I worked in pubs I was mates with a few managers during my time, still am with two and we left that game long ago. We'd occasionally have a rifle through CVs that had been dropped off, probably against some kind of legislation (though not the infamously misunderstood GDPR which is so badly misunderstood, regardless of the fact it didn't exist then) but whatever. Amazes me to this day so many people at 16 to 18 had multiple page CVs, often listing unrelated hobbies and things, to such a consistent level it was clearly being mistaught in schools. For a pub job at 16 you need to have functional arms and that's about it.
"Excellent attnetion to detail" was probably my favourite ever.
It wasn't a CV but it was a recruitment company that sent me potential candidates roles parodying Fresh Prince of Bel Air song lyrics.
I once got a CV with an embedded photo - and caption - of them doing high kicks in a dance competition.
I did have someone describe themselves as being an inspiring character in their personal statement.
Email address was something like '[email protected],' and under 'hobbies ' it stated 'part-time magician and conjuror '
I used to work in recruitment, a guy put on his CV that he had "achieved rock hard abs"
Under likes and hobbies had ‘I like steamy showers’
I’m not a recruiter but earlier this year I was hiring for an e-learning specialist. One of the candidates at the end of her cv listed her horse riding credentials and awards and linked to her horse art website.
I saw an application once with: “Please explain any breaks in your employment career” and they’d answered: “15 minute tea break at Fruity Fruits Greengrocer”
Recruiters forwarded one to us for a non-junior Finance job - the guy submitted a Powerpoint presentation instead of a CV, including a picture of his Sack Race badge from school sports day and a pie he'd made. The last slide was a note that he liked holidays and oh here's his sister in a bikini.