Advice from a Hiring Manager: What NOT To Do In Your Cover Letter and Resumé

June 4th, 2008 - 

Ever since receiving a promotion at work a little while ago I've found that one of my main duties is serving as a hiring manager
for my office. Between retirements and position changes and job
additions I have been hiring and moving people around for the better
part of a year now. I have seen hundreds (maybe thousands) of resumés
over that time and I thought I would impart upon you some of the things
which could very well be preventing you from getting that dream job or
even that pity interview.

As I'm wading through all these resumés and cover letters and job
applications I have several things that I'm ultimately looking for, no
matter what kind of position it is. I'm looking for:

It's only okay to send naked photos of yourself with your resumé if you're hot.

1. Someone who can do the job.

2. Someone who wants to do the job.

3. Someone who will stay for more than a few months.

4. Someone who will fit in with the current staff.

That's it. I don't care if you're brilliant or have excellent oral
hygiene or know the Pope on a personal level. I don't care about your
hobbies or your volunteer work or what kind of position you want. I
just want to know that you'll help out, won't screw me and won't end up
pissing off everyone else. It helps to know if you're hot, but if
you're really annoying you still won't get the job.

Below are some of the horrifying things I've seen on resumés that
have landed on my desk. Please, for your career, don't do these:

Use a wacky email address: Sure, having an email
address like "hansolo32@aol.com" or "sexxxy-latin-mamma@comcast.net" is
clever and fun when you shout it across the bar as you order your
seventh beer on a Friday night. It's really not all that amusing, and
even a little bit creepy, at 10am while I'm sipping my coffee and
wearing pants. Here's a tip: free email. Welcome to the 1990's. Just
get a professional address and stop putting
"funkychunkymunky@verizon.net" at the top of your resumé.

State in your cover letter that you're applying for multiple jobs in the same company:
I work for a large company and we always have a lot of job openings.
Please don't write one letter and resumé and send it in for all the
open jobs that sound interesting. That just tells me you really don't
care about MY open job, you just want ANY open job. Sure, I know, you
were once told that if you "just send your resume in" out of the blue
that the Human Resources department will hold on to it and lovingly
care for it and hold it until the perfect job opens up and they'll call
you in. That's a load of manure. Human Resources people are swamped and
they don't care about finding you a job. They care about how they're
going to reprimand that guy in accounting who keeps putting up
pornographic photos of sheep on his cube wall. If I'm expected to have
the decency to call you in for an interview then YOU should have the
decency to write a separate letter and resumé for my open position.

State in your cover letter that you can't find a job and you've been applying for months/years/decades:
Sooo... you're a loser. Don't advertise it. If someone else doesn't want
to hire you, why would I? Seriously, cover letters and resumés are
about listing strengths and being positive and blowing sunshine up my
ass. Be truthful, but just enough to get in the door. The interview is
when I'll have a chance to find out things that are less than wonderful
like your habit of picking your nose with your tongue.

Use abbreviations that aren't explained: I work in
a somewhat technical field, so I get this a lot. I see resumes that
list experience with "I-Mod 4.3, 4.4, 4.45 and configulating RMF
adapters under EEbIEM Licensing protocol 92.1." Great. Thank you. I'm
very impressed. Right now I'm using Microsoft Word 12.0.6311.4998 SP1.
Do you think I'm smarter for it? No, you think I'm a tool. I find that
older tech workers love to cram in all sorts of pseudo-technical terms
and product names with versions, hoping that a bunch of letters and
abbreviations will sound impressive enough to get them in the door.
Guess what? If Human Resources can't figure out what the hell you're
talking about I probably won't even get a chance to see your alphabet
soup of a resumé. Write your resumé and cover letter so that a 5th
grader can understand it. Remember: you're future boss will be the one
who hires you and think about how stupid you think most bosses are.

List your boring hobbies: I've never hired someone
or even invited them in for an interview because they liked "music,
reading, going for walks and surfing the Internet." You know what those
hobbies prove? They prove that you're human... barely. Everyone likes and
does those things, so I don't care about them. In fact, I don't care
about anything you do outside of the office as long as it isn't
cleaning your gun and stalking me. If you have some sort of
extraordinary and relevant volunteer work or hobby that might somehow
help with the job then you might want to find a way to weasel it in.
Most of the jobs I hire for are technical and somewhat menial, so
unless you have a hobby like watching paint dry it probably isn't going
to help much.

Use poor grammar: Okay, sure, most hiring managers
and human resources can barely compose a three word email without
butchering the English language. Guess what? I was an English major and
now it's my turn to pick on all you people who made fun of me back in
college. I regularly read letters with sentence fragments, grammatical
errors and just plain old weird language. I once had a person apply for
the "data enterer job" where she was qualified because she "maintenance
of the intensive data base." What? Where's the verb? What's an
intensive data base? And isn't "data base" really one word? Have
multiple people look your resumé over before sending it out. Typos are
inevitable, but not catching and fixing them makes it look like you
don't care. We all make misteaks...

Pad your resumé to make it appear more full: If
you're new in the work world I'm okay with that. List some classes you
took or change spacing a little bit. List the relevant things that you
can, be honest, but don't just chuck in random bullet points of
responsibility. I once had a person who listed three jobs and each of
the three jobs listed "Attended meetings," as a responsibility. I don't
consider that a job responsibility any more than "sat in chair" or
"drove to work each day."

Make your resumé longer than two pages: I don't
care if you've had more jobs than Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest
combined, your resumé shouldn't be longer than two pages simply because
I don't have the time or the energy to read a four page resume and try
to pick out the important things. I have a two foot stack of other
resumés to get through and I probably have one day to do it. A resumé
is supposed to show relevant highlights, not everything you've ever
done to make a buck since grade school.

Use strange fonts, paper or formatting: Please,
consider the fact that not everyone likes to read pages of 8 point
italicized Script MT Bold text. Consider the fact that most companies
use some sort of scanning software that needs clear text and consider
the fact that many hiring managers are old farts with bad eyes. I
guarantee you won't impress anyone with clever use of fonts or tabs or
shading or highlighting or nice parchment-like paper. Every fourth
grader in the nation knows how to change fonts by now. And I've never
heard someone scream out, "Let's hire this guy!! He can type on
PARCHMENT!!" You know what I think when I see a resumé that isn't on
plain white paper and with a readable font? I think "Oh, that's
eye-catching... and I can't read it and the person is clearly trying to
hide something or has spent too much time hanging around Ren Faires."

You get the idea. Here's a good rule of thumb for sending in resumes and cover letters for jobs: Don't be Stupid.

Sure, every company does hiring a different way and what works for
one company may not work for another. But hiring managers are all human
(well, maybe not in law offices) and we all pretty much want the same
thing: someone who can do the job, who won't annoy us and who may make
our dull, miserable lives a little more enjoyable.

Remember: hiring managers are people, too. If you screw up your
resume or cover letter, don't worry about it too much. It's not like
we're going to post all your stupid mistakes in some blog and spread it
all over the internet or anything...