The interview started off strange, but the security footage finished the story. I was a manager at a trampoline park when I was sixteen or seventeen, and I handled all the interviews since most applicants went to the same high school as me. One day, a guy in his late thirties came in with almost no job experience and a bachelor’s degree in literature. His age was odd because the rest of the staff were high school or college kids, but the degree caught me completely off guard.
I asked him why he wanted a minimum wage job when he had a degree. He told me he was supposed to be a teacher, but they wouldn’t hire him because of serious issues in his background. Then he said he’d been traumatized as a child. He was applying for a job at a kids’ trampoline park.
He gave me a bad feeling, so I checked the cameras before he left. I saw him taking inappropriate photos of children at the park. He left before I could confront him, so I gave his resume and a hard drive with the full recording of his visit to the local police. I once failed miserably to get a high school job, and I thought I was doing everything right.
I mentioned volunteer experience, talked about my work ethic, and always showed up to interviews in a button-up shirt, slacks, and a tie, even just to ask about open positions. After a year of getting turned down by Taco Bell, KFC, and every other decent high school job, I finally found the problem. Under the previous legal history section, I had listed an incident incorrectly. My seventeen-year-old self had a loose grasp on the legal system and didn’t realize that getting arrested for a fight isn’t the same as being charged with a felony.
I had been arrested on an assault misdemeanor but never charged. I didn’t figure that out until I applied for military service and was told my felony charge was a permanent disqualification. A very unprofessional email address is one of those small resume red flags people overlook. You see some truly insane email addresses on applications.
I once knew someone whose email had big daddy in it, which probably isn’t the first impression you want to make when applying for a job. For anyone who needs a professional email address, keep it boring. Any combination of your first name, middle name, last name, initials, and birth year is usually fine. Random numbers are okay too, as long as they aren’t obviously jokes like 420, 69, or 666.
It’s worth having one very bland email address for anything where you don’t want the email itself to make an impression, including job applications, legal matters, professional accounts, school documents, banking, and emailing your grandma because she refuses to text. Don’t email your grandma, a recruiter, or a potential employer from your old booty slayer email. If your birthday happens to include one of those numbers, be careful with how you format it. If your birthday is April 20, adding the full date and year, like 042099, makes it look much more obviously like a birth date instead of a joke.
The person reviewing your application will probably understand the difference. The main point is simple. Your email address doesn’t need to be creative. It just needs to look like it belongs to an adult who wants to be taken seriously.
There’s also the guy who applied for a design job and attached a photoshopped image of him as a centaur. And typos. I was hiring a very senior level person who seemed like they could do an amazing job, but there were several typos in her resume. I asked the recruiter to let her know.
Neither resume was tossed. The centaur applied at a time when we had no open positions, and the typo person got the interview. After a rigorous hiring process, she was determined to have great skills, but not what we needed. She misspelled her very large font, easy to spell job title.
People keep saying gaps in work history are red flags, but honestly, make sure you inquire about it before writing someone off. I had a guy with a year or two gap in his resume. Most people would just assume something was wrong with him. There was something.
He had been diagnosed with brain cancer and went through intensive treatment. He lived, but came out the other end jobless. He couldn’t find work afterward because of the gap. I could tell he was a smart dude who just got dealt a bad hand.
I hired him, and he’s honestly worked out great. He still works at that company. I thought of another one, though this is more about being a jerk in an interview. I work in a predominantly male trade as a service lead, so I know my trade.
Maybe I’m on the younger side, but I’ve been in this business for over ten years. My male boss asked me to interview a guy before he arrived because my boss was running late, and this guy was going to be my employee anyway. The guy seemed okay at first, then it went downhill fast. He asked me for coffee from Starbucks.
Not office coffee. He wanted me to go fetch him Starbucks. Hell no. Then he started asking me interview questions, like trick questions.
He started telling me I was so smart, but in that tone that made it clear he was just generally a schmuck. I was done. I told him the interview was over. He said he’d wait for the boss to do his actual interview.
He wouldn’t leave. The boss eventually came in and threw him out. You’d think he had to fail interviews for unemployment or something, but he actually didn’t want to work. Why else would you intentionally tank your prospects that hard?
There was never any follow-up from an unemployment office. That last part was purely speculation. Here’s a related but off-topic anecdote. While working as a hiring manager, I was in the middle of an interview with this sweet older retired teacher.
I asked her to tell me about how she deals with unrealistic expectations. She started talking about one of her old students’ parents. While describing the woman, she said, this lady was a real freaking witch, you know. Then she paused and said she shouldn’t have said that, apologized, and said it had been a long freaking time since she’d had an interview.
She cursed again, apologized again, said she didn’t mean to curse, she was just freaking nervous, and then she said damn it, and that it was like she had a freaking Tourette’s, and she swore she didn’t. At that point, I held up a hand to steady her and get her to stop speaking. I was choking back laughter. She stopped, started collecting her things, and said she wasn’t going to get the damn job.
She apologized again, said she hadn’t had to do an interview in a long time, and that she was just out of practice. Then she walked out of the office, out the front door, and got into her car. She put the car in reverse and backed straight into the front door, into our lobby. She crashed her car through the front door by accident, not out of spite.
She was seriously rattled by her own filthy mouth and just trying to get away as quickly as possible. I felt so bad for her that I called her the next day and offered a second interview. She declined. I’m that hiring manager who digs into the weird stuff.
If you’re interviewing for an enterprise software job and list Unity 3D on there, let’s dig in. If you’re interviewing for a React gig but listed a Raspberry Pi project to control a kegerator, let’s talk about that one. If you wrote a Minecraft plugin, okay, let’s figure that out. I figure the weirder the thing on the resume is, the higher the chance you’re passionate about it.
If you aren’t, then you’re probably not being truthful about much else. This isn’t the end all be all. Not everyone has weird, totally unrelated stuff in their resume, but if you do, remember it’s fair game. Other red flags include resumes longer than two pages, job experiences of a month or less, claiming they work at GitHub when in smaller font they just have a couple crappy repos hosted there, disguising Coursera certificates as a bachelor’s degree, obnoxious use of adjectives when describing themselves in the third person, oversharing personal details like religion, long lists of buzzwords and libraries, programming claims of knowing technology X when being asked about it makes it very clear they have no idea, programming demands like I won’t do X or Y for designers, recommendation letters from the CEO of a big design agency when asked why they aren’t hiring you and the answer is oh, he’s my dad’s friend, portfolios with plagiarized work, candidates who don’t remove rollerblades during an interview, candidates who sit on the desk the entire interview while you’re sitting in a chair and refuse to sit normally, people who show up intoxicated or suspiciously hyperactive and transcendental, people who go on rants about the Amish and their beards, people who can’t stop talking about Joe Rogan, people who use the n-word during an interview referring to an old coworker, people who ask if you’re Jewish repeatedly, people who demand to see the company’s code before continuing the interview process, and people who attempt to speak in Hindi after you’ve reiterated that you don’t speak Hindi.
Pulling a Robert California doesn’t play as well in real life. Trust me. Those are just top of mind. I could fill a book with weird interviews I’ve been part of.
I also had a girl hand in a resume every day for about two weeks because she really wanted to work for us. Her CV had bar charts of her strengths and weaknesses, and under her hobbies she put cats and that was it. We were kind of put off by the fact that she came in every day. She was actually way overqualified for the job and said she wouldn’t stop coming in until we interviewed her.
So we interviewed her to get her to stop coming in. She obviously came in every day to find out if she got the job. Pretty awkward. She handed a physical copy of her resume every time.
We ended up with about fourteen copies. They started getting shredded around day five. I hire in the data analytics space, and one main red flag for me is skill stuffing, when someone lists every language, application, and system they’ve ever used regardless of applicability or level of experience. Some general tips.
Gaps in your employment are fine, but be prepared to talk about why or what you did. Likewise, short stints in a role can be a red flag and you’ll be asked about it, but as long as you can articulate why, it’s usually fine. Please, no more than two pages for a CV ever. I usually only read the second page if the first page impresses.
I’ve had ten-plus page CVs sent to me for roles where the ability to articulate information concisely was a role requirement. Talk about what you contributed and what impact that had, not what you were responsible for. Instead of I looked after reporting, say I used data to identify operational improvements which saved the business ten million dollars. This is also true for interview answers.
Talk about learning in both your CV and interview. Showing you’re keen to learn and continuously improve is an important skill. They often ask in interviews what the last thing you learned was, or something along those lines. I’ve been holding interviews, and for me, spelling mistakes really hurt the candidate.
I’m hiring for a warehouse position, but if you can’t spell school, and yes, someone misspelled school in the resume, I’m afraid I can’t take this any further. Also, I interviewed someone last week and he wrote back a week after I let him know he didn’t have the position. He asked if it was because he was black. I didn’t reply, and he called me a racist and a Trump supporter.
First of all, I’m Canadian, my children are Jewish, and the best man at my wedding is Indian. I hate racism, and throwing that on me freaking hurt. I hate hiring. The dude showed up to the interview with his mask below his nose, wearing shorts and sandals for a warehouse position.
That’s why I didn’t hire you, schmuck. I used to do hiring triage for a university library. Gearing up for the fall semester, I’d have to read through over five hundred applications. The record was in the 750s for the usual thirty hires.
We got some terrible ones. The most common were leet or text speak, all lowercase, all caps, three-word answers to multi-part questions. Some applicants didn’t have federal work study awards, which wasn’t an indication of a bad applicant, but we were clear upfront that we couldn’t hire anyone without it. We simply couldn’t afford it, since a student with work study cost us about a third of what an hourly student would.
Terrible availability was also not necessarily an indication of a bad applicant, but if you say you’re only available for two hours on Tuesday, Thursday, and every other Wednesday, don’t expect the call. Some ignored the questions about putting things in alphabetical or numerical order, or did them but obviously didn’t read the directions, putting things in ascending order when asked for descending, or to a lesser extent getting them wrong. Normally, calling to check up on your application was an immediate bump up to be forwarded for further consideration, assuming availability and work study checked out. But if you had your parents call, that was another story.
One day I worked from four p. m. to two thirty a. m.
and came back to a blinking light on my phone indicating voicemail. I checked it and found several messages. The first one was from around eight thirty in the morning, an angry woman demanding I call back by noon to explain why we hadn’t hired her son. The second message was from around ten thirty, the same woman snarling that I hadn’t called and that she would have my job because her son had work study, and therefore we legally must hire him.
No. Just because he wants to work in the library doesn’t mean that. The third message was from around eleven, from my supervisor wondering if I could find the son’s application. She’d gotten an angry voicemail from the mother, and when she looked in my files, she hadn’t seen it anywhere.
Other normal messages followed. Since this woman demanded I call before noon, I was all gung-ho to call her at 11:45 p. m. to explain my work schedule to her and that I couldn’t legally discuss her son’s application anyway.
But I figured I should talk to my supervisor and at least warn her of this plan. Turns out when the woman called again around two p. m. , she got forwarded to my supervisor, who had remembered the internal online database of applicants I’d created for her and the other hiring supervisors to check when I was out.
Using that, she discovered that the kid’s file wasn’t in my desk because I’d initially rated him fairly well. It was worth another look. Armed with the notes on her file, she told mommy dearest what was going on. Damn, I wish I could have seen that woman’s face when she was told we didn’t hire her son because he never called us back when we contacted him for an interview.
I’d bet the kid intentionally didn’t return the call because he didn’t want to work there after his mom embarrassed him like that. I once received a resume from someone who had paid for a list of email addresses for IT managers, development managers, technical leaders, and hopeless frauds like me. The document was a printed-to-PDF PowerPoint presentation full of word art awfulness and Escher clip art professing the sender’s undying love for a particular programming language. Every other page featured the name of said language in huge font, links to software projects they really liked but had nothing to do with, and full contact, passport, and visa details.
Alas, their girlfriend called me on the day of the interview to indicate that the candidate had the craps and couldn’t come in. I have kind of an opposite story where my red flag was overlooked due to a random circumstance. I applied for a director level position at a nonprofit. I had been in my current job for close to ten years, so I had to create a new resume before I applied.
I made a basic barebones draft and asked a resume-savvy friend to rework it with all the bells and whistles. She made it absolutely amazing. I sent it off and planned the call and follow-up. I had done some research on the place before deciding to apply and noticed that the CEO’s secretary, who was the contact for the job, had the same uncommon last name as a high-level executive I had worked closely with on a number of projects in my current job.
I ran a separate division within the organization. After a quick Google search, I found out they were married. When I called to follow up on the job, I nonchalantly mentioned I knew someone with their last name and asked if there was any relation. We had some quick small world chitchat, and she said they’d be in touch.
Within a couple hours, she called me back and asked if I could do a phone interview with the CEO that afternoon. I had the interview a few hours later and definitely noticed the CEO seemed somewhat standoffish at the start. I didn’t think much of it. It ended up going really well, and he asked me to come in a few days later for an interview with him and a panel of some senior staff.
I was pumped. The evening before the interview, I was preparing with more research and printing out resumes in case the panel members didn’t have copies. I opened the resume file and was confused when my draft resume opened up instead of the reworked final edit. I looked in a couple other places for the final version but couldn’t find it.
I remembered I had sent the final version to the CEO, so I went to my sent folder and grabbed it from there. I almost had a heart attack when I opened the file and realized I had accidentally sent him the draft version. I had somehow overwritten the final version with the draft. Not only was it barebones, but I had added some stupid jokey thing throughout it since I was sending it to my friend to rework.
There was nothing lewd or vulgar, but it was basically the most unprofessional resume I could have sent. For example, the header read in big letters, this dude is awesome. I freaked out in a fit of humiliation, quickly followed by utter confusion as to why they would even consider me for the job after seeing this ridiculous resume. I was able to find the final version and immediately emailed it to the CEO with a my face is red apology.
I printed a crapload of copies to take to the interview as well. The next day, I showed up, nailed the interview, got a job offer immediately, and even talked myself into a salary ten thousand dollars above the offer. A short time after I started the job, once I felt comfortable bringing it up, I asked a colleague who was on the interview panel if other people knew about the draft resume I had accidentally sent. Oh yes, they did.
Apparently, it was passed around to many of the senior level people, and everyone was like, this idiot is the guy they want to hire. They said that because I had done so well in the interview and they saw I was willing to laugh about my humiliating mistake, they were on board to hire me. Apparently, when I had told the CEO’s secretary that I knew her husband when I applied for the job, she had immediately called him and asked about me. She told me his response to her was a very enthusiastic, oh crap, he’s leaving our company.
That freaking sucks for us. Hire him immediately. You won’t find anyone better. She passed that on to the CEO and CFO, who at that point were ready to throw my crappy resume in the garbage and move on to the next candidate.
They decided that after such a glowing recommendation from her executive-level husband, they should at least give me a quick phone interview before telling me to get lost. Without that one random circumstance, the red flag of my own doing would have ended my chances at what turned out to be an amazing opportunity. The moral is, double check your crap before sending it off. The craziest part is that I’m about ninety-nine percent sure the guy I replaced at that job was sleeping with the CEO’s secretary, whose husband was the sole reason I was hired.
I didn’t actually have proof, and I had lost touch with her husband before any suspicions arose, so I never said anything. Buzzword salad is a big one. Listing every hot technology plus ridiculous stuff. Example experience in C, Java, SQL, XML, JSON, CSV, PostgreSQL, SQL Server.
If you’re listing file formats and several flavors of SQL, it’s a bit much. I like descriptions of the work you did, like created a Java app that fetches XML files from an SFTP, parses the data, applies business logic requirements which I helped define with the accounting department, and loads results into an Aurora DB. That’s the kind of line I would ask about and try to dig into to find out what you really know. As a lot of people point out, they have been victims of the screening bots, which I’m very aware exist.
I’ll also clarify that while I’m an IT manager who hires people, I’m not an HR recruiter who tends to work with such bots. I think you can and probably should put the buzzword salad on your resume, but don’t make it the highlight. Put your key skills and projects in the first couple pages so human eyes can get a sense of what you’re good at or what technology you specialize in. If you have that, I can gloss over the blurb that lists every OS, IDE, and file system you’ve ever touched.
I know why that’s there. I understand. But what I need to understand is what your real skill set is. Oh man, I have two that I haven’t seen in this thread yet.
First, whenever someone lists creative director or president or head honcho of their own personal website or company or design studio as experience or a title they’ve had, I can’t roll my eyes hard enough. These people don’t own their own business. They have a Squarespace or ArtStation website and are claiming it’s a design house when it’s just their portfolio site. Second, and this happens way too often, is lying in your resume or portfolio.
I used to work at a company that had the worst screening process or recruiters. Unfortunately, I would get terrible applicants’ resumes on my desk after interviews had already been scheduled. I once went to an applicant’s portfolio site and saw this cute little plane game embedded at the top. It was really cool, but I was a little suspicious because I felt like I’d seen it somewhere.
I did a little Googling and sure enough, found out who the real creator was. Spoiler, it wasn’t the guy I was interviewing. I even asked about it in the interview, wondering if he meant to say he’d taken the code and modified it a little. Nope.
He claimed he built the whole thing. The worst part was that my company had paid to fly his butt down from Northern California to Southern California. Another standout was a guy who claimed to have worked on five very prominent AAA games from the previous year. I was confused on several levels.
The five games were all from different game studios but released the same year. His portfolio showed one screenshot from each game, and they were all readily available from Google. He claimed to have done extensive work on each, and his resume clearly stated he was working at a marketing firm. I later came to realize he hadn’t actually worked on any of those games, but his marketing firm had done some advertising for them.
He also claimed during the interview that he had worked with classic comic book artists as an intern when he was a teenager. I don’t get how people think they can just come up with insane lies like this and get away with it. But then again, it managed to fool my company’s art director and recruiter. Bad grammar, rambling, anything longer than a page and a half is a flag in my book.
At larger companies like the one I work for, most of these things are filtered by headhunters and recruiter types. They send me three to six resumes that get past them. From there, I go over the experience portions of these resumes and pick the ones that most closely relate to the position we’re hiring for. The thing you need to work on more than puffing yourself up in a resume is your interview skills.
I don’t know what it is, but people have lost the art of conversation. Most people come in with rehearsed, rehashed answers that seem to have come out of a magazine. Just be open, honest, and be yourself. If you’ve made it to the live interview, chances are your qualifications line up, and what you’re really being interviewed for is your demeanor, your ability to handle pressure, and to tell you the truth, whether you’re someone the rest of the crew will get along with.
Second-guessing our requirements or presuming to tell us our business is another red flag. For example, saying I don’t actually know the technology you’re using, but you shouldn’t be using it anyway. There are a few close runner-ups. Some are more prevalent in cover letters than in CVs, though some applicants don’t seem to know what should go in either.
Emphasis on things around the work rather than the work itself communicates a lack of understanding and respect. We have tasks that need doing by someone with a specific set of skills. Your application should reflect that you understand this. This isn’t a fraternity or a flat share.
Claims of seniority based on nothing but time served are also suspect. If someone has been in the industry for ten years but lists no real accomplishments, I get skeptical. So does snark and shade in the CV. I can only hope that those providing advice here are not all hiring managers because you really suck at it.
I’m particularly venting at those complaining about too many job changes, employment history gaps, and making demands for loyalty. This isn’t the sixties where people are expected to work at the same company for life in return for a knockoff gold watch. Stop trying to guess what happened as a reason to reject someone. Consider a person’s experience and achievements, and if there’s a match, determine if they’re someone you want to hire at the interview.
How long employees stay is almost always dictated by the behavior of people in management and leadership positions at the company they work for. If you go to work every day dreading what the day holds, then you owe it to yourself to find another job. You should continue to look for a company that provides room for growth and gives you a working environment and job you like. If a company is rejecting your resume because it has too many job changes, you’re probably better off not working there because they have their priorities wrong.
If you employ someone and they leave, there’s a high probability it’s something the company is doing wrong, not the employee. People don’t change jobs just because they feel like it. They change mostly because their manager’s behavior or toxic company culture. Every job someone has adds to their experience and value.
Don’t eliminate them because they’ve had a few jobs. Hire them and make sure you do what it takes to keep them there. Deciding not to hire someone who has changed jobs often because it’s a sign of poor loyalty should make you ashamed. You get loyalty from your actions toward your employees, not because you hired them and think they should be loyal in return.
I don’t know many companies that wouldn’t happily fire an employee if they needed to save costs and lay off staff. Why should an employee be loyal if a company doesn’t return that loyalty? If someone has a gap in the resume, so what? This is especially true given the high unemployment rates caused by COVID.
Judging someone because they’re out of work for a while is nonsense. Including things you googled or find interesting as research interests or areas of expertise is a red flag. Leaving out details like work or education and assuming the person hiring you will fill in the gaps is another. Not knowing how to format a resume is a red flag, as is having very little work experience even if you’re a recent grad.
I’ve seen a lot of resumes with no work experience at all for positions that aren’t entry level. I’d rather someone include their retail or bartender job than leave me to guess whether this person in their twenties has ever worked with other people before. It’s not always the case, but I’ve seen a few too many recent grads quit two weeks in because they couldn’t cope with the transition from school to a forty-plus hour work week. Also, take advantage of online resources or resume workshops, especially if this is your first time applying.
I was looking over the resume of a friend of mine, and she listed her research interests as AI and sentient robotics, neuroscience and human emotions. She’s a web designer. I asked her what she meant by human emotions, and she couldn’t answer. I can’t say this enough.
Reading about something is not research. It’s not the equivalent of being an expert on it. She also wouldn’t include her undergraduate university because she assumed that since she listed her master’s, they’d know she had a bachelor’s. Oddly, it was a world-renowned school, so I’m not sure why she wouldn’t include it, but I couldn’t convince her otherwise.
Don’t leave things like that out. It’s another red flag that you have no idea what you’re doing. I worked for a headhunter for a couple of months. While we would contact interesting candidates, we also received a lot of resumes for a database, and some of them were brutal to read.
Quite a few came from men in their mid-fifties who had worked at one company for more than twenty years and ended up in middle management. Consolidation, bankruptcy, or restructuring had eliminated their positions. They were basically out of luck, with many of them applying for roles far beneath their experience level. The worst resumes usually came from recent graduates.
Some were littered with spelling errors. I remember one guy apparently used a template to create his resume and didn’t bother filling it out properly, so it was addressed to ad company and signed by applicant. One guy, fresh out of college, even included a letter of recommendation from his mother. The biggest red flag is lying or being dishonest.
We all know your true passion probably isn’t B2B sales of double corrugated packaging. So leave that kind of nonsense out. Also, during interviews, when you’re asked to name your weaknesses, don’t try to give one of those fake weaknesses that isn’t really a weakness. Any half-awake HR person will see right through it.
Just give an actual weakness, but phrase it carefully. Obviously, don’t say you’re a lazy slob who will do just enough work not to get fired. The resume training from a university department essentially told us to go for a real weakness, but in a technical area, not a personality or behavioral weakness. I do hiring for a retail store with a big reputation in particular.
I honestly don’t look at resumes too heavily. I skim them and remove anything too crazy. I look at past work history as well. It’s the interviews that get people.
If an interviewer asks you if you see a coworker steal, what would you do? Any answer other than telling your manager on the spot is instant disqualification. I can’t tell you how many great people have thrown their potential job in the trash by saying they’d do nothing. Even if you wouldn’t say anything, just lie to me.
Don’t try to steer your interview toward your religion either. I’m performing an interview for a job, and you pushing me to find God mid-interview is only going to ruin your chances at a job as well as come off as distasteful. Oh, and don’t show up to the interview intoxicated. That’s happened more than enough times for me to continue finding it funny.
As a recruiter or manager, there are too many red flags to choose from. When you look at fifty-plus resumes per day, hundreds per week, you learn a few things. I want everyone looking for a job to know that we don’t look at the entire resume ever. We look for relevant experience in the most recent positions, education, and buzzwords.
Buzzwords are king or queen for recruiters who screen resumes for hiring managers. Buzzwords are strategically put in the job description on purpose as they are what the team values in the position. Most of them are in the qualifications section. Examples are coachable, collaborate, results-driven, self-starter, innovative, integrity, etc.
Find ways to implement them at the top of the resume or in the cover letter. No more than three paragraphs. After one or two, we know if we want to speak with you. If you have relevant experience, education, or skills that are good for the job you’re applying to, frame it very near the top of the resume.
Also, don’t put your home address in your resume ever. Keep the city and zip code, but never put your physical address on there. Managers google it, and sometimes recruiters do too. I’ve had candidates not get jobs because of where they lived did not match the level of the position.
People who lived in four-thousand-square-foot houses were applying for entry-level and lower-level roles. It’s hard. I know. If you’re looking for work after being laid off and have to start at the bottom to pay the bills, I’ll be honest, we also want what’s best for you and have to protect our jobs as well.
We’re based on retention of the candidate sometimes, and if you take a job just to take a job, there’s a high chance you’ll leave as soon as something pops up. I don’t blame you, but it hurts your bonus and growth opportunity. Don’t ever sell yourself short. And for the love of whoever you pray to, never be rude or hostile to a recruiter.
They’re the first step in the hiring process. If you make a bad impression on them, you bet your bum they’re going to tell the hiring manager everything that went down. And for the most part, they have a relationship with the recruiter. They should.
If amazing candidates on paper turn out to be huge crap in email responses for a phone screen or were awful on the phone, it brings us so much joy to reject you in the system and send you an email saying they did not select you. Recruiters don’t know everything, but they know enough, and it’s their job to screen you for the hiring manager. When we see so many candidates per day, we are exhausted. If your first impression is awful, you’re out.
Now, please don’t write your next hire or your next ace on your resume. You look like a douche, and everything after that is irrelevant. Bloating your resume to make you look more qualified for a low-level or entry-level position is another red flag. Had a girl come in for a pizza place and list several super high-ranking military officials as references.
She was twenty-one. She was a shift manager at Dairy Queen who worked at a call center before that. But instead of saying call center agent, she worded it something super glorified that made me think about it and realize she was exaggerating her resume. If you have military officers to recommend you to work at a pizza place, just go get a different, better job.
Either you’re a crappy employee and had your parents pull strings, you’re banking on us not checking references, which we don’t, because it’s food service, or you’re really overqualified and we don’t want to hear you complain about how much you make after working there for a month because you have all these qualifications and know these people. Seriously, people, tailor your resume to the job you’re applying for. Remember that you’re trying to get your foot in the door with online resumes where we, as hiring managers, sift through a stack of applicants and have to choose some to call back for in-person interviews. If your resume looks like crap or too good to be true, chances are we aren’t going to waste our time.
Bring a pen. This is mainly for first jobbers or people going around filling out applications. Bring your own pen. When I was in the service industry, people would come in all the time and ask for applications.
The manager or hostess would give them an application, and many people came in without a pen. I never understood why. You’re coming in to fill out an application. You should at least bring the basic necessity to fill out said application.
If the hostess was the one to take the application from the person, she’d have to borrow a pen from them and write on top of the application, no pen. I don’t think anyone who didn’t bring their own pen got hired. Overselling yourself is another one. I was hiring a part-time assistant for a wine-related business that pays eighteen dollars an hour.
One girl wrote a whole paragraph about how she’s overqualified and an amazing asset to her company because she’s a business owner herself, and said that because of these facts, she requires twenty-two dollars an hour with one additional day per week. It was normally three eight-hour days to avoid full-time benefits. This would potentially be understandable with someone overqualified, but she had absolutely no experience other than being a server at a pretty average restaurant, a part-time yoga instructor, and her business as a spiritual coach. Because of the volume of applicants, I don’t reply to those who don’t make it past the first round.
But I really, really wanted to give her a reality check. I used to do the hiring for the dining room staff at a nursing home. Red flags fluctuated over time, but for the majority of my time hiring, it was poor resume presentation, pencil bullet points, overqualification, and age. If the resume was full of misspelled words and fun clip art, we ignored it in favor of others we could get a hold of for references, for obvious reasons.
If the resume had a ton of work experience in the service industry or actual restaurants, or tons of schooling, we hesitated in setting up interviews because we knew our hiring wages were crap compared to what you could make in an actual restaurant, and we couldn’t accept tips. At the other end, if they were in high school, we ignored it outright. We’d been burned by so many high school students quitting with no notice, calling out every week, having their parents tell us they couldn’t work because they were grounded, or just being lazy little entitled craps who wouldn’t know work ethic if it danced in front of them. This isn’t to say we didn’t interview nearly every resume we got.
Nine times out of ten, the overqualified people would decide they didn’t want to work for less than twelve dollars an hour. A few of our high school students were the hardest working kids I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with, and some with the grammatical sense of a baboon ended up being incredibly good at their jobs. We always decided after the interview whether or not we wanted to hire them. And ten times out of ten, the interview tells you so much more than a silly resume.
Not exactly a red flag, but not professional. I’ll have stay-at-home mothers who write mommy under work history and only describe it as the most rewarding job in the world. I understand being a stay-at-home mother is difficult and requires a lot of different skills. Just say what they are.
Instead of mommy, best job in the world, write stay-at-home parent in charge of scheduling for X number of people, prepares X number of meals per day, drives to appointments and meetings, is in charge of household cleaning, sewing, maintenance, etc. My work has low standards for hires, but it does have standards. These women need to see that there is great value in what they do, but they should communicate that instead of just hoping the hiring manager has children too and realizes all the tasks that need to be done. When a person gives I am, I do, I always statements instead of providing examples in short story-like fashion, it’s a problem.
When I’m reading job applications and resumes, it’s no use to me if it doesn’t give me an example of what you’re good at. For example, for a job in account management, bad content would be having a qualification in account management. A good example would be holding an account management qualification with three years of experience successfully managing accounts of over one hundred fifty clients. An excellent example would be holding the qualification, having three years of experience successfully managing accounts of over one hundred fifty clients, and achieving a company record of X number of sales in a single month, boosting the company’s profits for the month by a specific amount.
The more we can see not only what you’re qualified in, but how experienced you are and how you’ve used that experience, the more your resume stands out. I’ve been in the security industry in the metro LA area as a guard and team manager since college and my military time. I’ve sat in on some interviews, and I’ve got to say, a big gap between jobs is a big red flag for this line of work. It could mean jail or prison time.
We try to investigate and work with folks as much as we can, but we’re largely limited by state law and company policy. It’s hard to get a guard card with a violent felony. Substance possession under the influence is whatever, but sales are a hard no with negligent hiring precedent. However, we did hire a guy who had done five years in state prison, largely because he was upfront about what he did.
Weapons and gang crap. He’s been clean since, and had a letter of recommendation from his parole officer, who happened to be an acquaintance of mine from military time. The guy already had his guard card at the time of the interview. How he did that within six months of being out and on parole, I don’t know.
I don’t want to know. What got me to tell the hiring manager to give him a shot was that he was creative enough to list his work experience on the resume as California Men’s Colony in Susanville, sanitation engineer and culinary specialist. He also agreed to our gray area cover-up task of not discussing his criminal background with anyone. Last I heard, the guy was done with parole and went to PT to go to welding school.
As a high school graduate trying to write a resume with zero experience, what should you avoid? Also, how do you keep your resume from looking empty? So far, all you’ve added is your current education status at a post-secondary institution and your high school diploma. You have some irrelevant hobbies.
You coded a little Java game for programming class and played guitar in the school band. You don’t think choir is really relevant either, unless you’re talking about the teamwork skills involved. You write a new cover letter for each job you apply to, but you never get an interview. The one interview you did get was canceled by the pandemic.
Well, if you like these stories, there’s more. YouTube thinks you’re going to love this. Catch you in that video.