Updating a resume is one of those tedious parts of finding a new job. Unless you have done it a lot, it can be hard to even quantify your literal life experience into a few bullet points. So it never hurts to seek out some help. Or, if you want to feel better about yourself, take a peek at what not to do.
Someone asked, “Employers, what can someone put on a resume that sends it straight to the shredder?” and netizens shared all the questionable choices they have encountered. So get comfortable as you read through, upvote your favorite examples, and be sure to comment your own thoughts below.
#1
The only resume I have thrown right in the proverbial shredder was that of the wife of a friend of mine. I was attempting to get her a job at my employer. She had no degree or relevant experience, but we needed a receptionist, and people commonly move up from those jobs into other admin positions. Plus, it's government work, so good benefits, lots of paid holidays, etc. Bottom line, I was doing this underqualified, unemployed person a massive favor by giving her a reference and a chance. We didn't have any other applicants. The job was hers to lose. She didn't know that, so she brought her A game. Here are some excerpts from her cover letter:
"I may not have a degree, but I have what engineers don't have, 10 years of experience."
"Engineers aren't very organized people and I can keep them in line."
"I have better social skills than engineers do."
I am not paraphrasing. Those are things she wrote when she sent me her resume and cover letter to look over before she submitted them online to apply. I was just like, "You know I'm an engineer, right?" She did. I continued, "You know the job you'd be applying for is a receptionist position, not an engineer position, right?" She seemed pretty sure she could move up and be an engineer in a year or so. That is not at all a thing in my field (it's one of those fields where everyone is required to be licensed and you have to have a degree in this just to be allowed to take the exam to get the license), but she was absolutely sure it was.
I told her that if she was going to submit this, she wouldn't be hired because the entire panel was engineers. She didn't listen, and submitted it. She even listed me as a reference. I told my boss she was someone I was trying to help and she wouldn't help herself, which was accurate, but "I've got what engineers don't have, 10 years of experience!" became the office joke for years to come. Every time someone reached the 10 year mark of their career, we'd be like, "You can't be an engineer anymore. The crazy lady said 10 years is the limit." lolMilitary spouse (with rank no less)Well, guy made it through the resume but almost didn't make it through the onboarding paperwork.
Entry level position, guy was 19 I think. Nice enough kid, low life experience but that's how it all starts right?
Emergency Contact info
Name - Mom
Relationship - Good
...so like if we called your mom, and you were hurt, she'd care?I received a resume last week that had notes on it “insert relevant skills here” and “maybe change font” “fill this space with buzz words” this was on his LinkedIn profile as well. If you can’t pay attention to the resume you send out I can’t trust you’ll pay attention to anything else.Food service experience applying for entry level call centre job put as her daily duties “wept and moped at the end of every shift”. I’m not gonna lie, I hired her and she was fine. I worked food service and was like where’s the lie?"Time Person of the Year 2006"I didn't make it past the name line on someone's resume one time.
We were hiring a CFO and Googling their name revealed an SEC complaint for a 9 figure fraud. At the time, there wasn't a verdict on the books, but I wasn't gonna wait for one. See you never.Nudes. Like, any picture of yourself is probably going to get the resume thrown out because of potential lawsuits, but hearing that shriek of "DEAR GOD WHY" from the hotel manager's desk while they were going through resumes was hilarious.
Like, bro, your butt was not that nice. Why did you attach it.The amount of halfwits that put Brexit voter on their CVs is just weird. Straight in the bin.I once got a resume with the worst formatting and grammar. It was clear the person was a non-native English speaker. I don't usually do this, but I recreated her resume, re-organized it and corrected grammar/spelling mistakes and sent it back to her. I hope she got a job. She wasn't a good fit based on her resume, otherwise I would have given her the benefit of the doubt and at least interviewed her.This guy put a tinder bio at the head of his resume. All his likes and dislikes, with a headshot of him holding an axe while looking sweaty.
I do IT work...I used to work for a bar, a girl came in with an application saying she was 22 but then listeded she'd graduated high school that year. I fired off a few questions then slipped in what's your birthday. She was barely 17.I once received a resume in the mail that had no telephone number, address or email. He called a few days later to ask why he hadn't received any reply. I asked him to get a copy of his resume so we could review it together. I asked him to tell me the address we might have replied to; then the telephone number and finally the email.
After a long pause, he said, "Aww, f**k!" and hung up.Okay, I was a writing tutor at the college level for 10 years. We also helped graduates of the university. I swear I am not making this up.
A graduate who had worked teaching English in Japan, and at other positions, for a few years after getting his degree, came in for help updating his resume. He reported that he'd been looking for work for a while, with no luck.
The profile section at the head of his resume listed accomplishments, including, "I have climbed Mount Fuji fueled only by Quaaludes and caffeine."
He was crestfallen when I told him that although I was duly impressed by this feat, he really, really needed to remove it.
Edit: because of course."Life Coach" and all their education is from sketchy seminars at the Radisson by the airport.
That's and hashtag bossbabe, CEO of their make up MLM.When I was in high school I worked in a shoe store at the mall. We got a resume once for a sales job that had, under the "Other Interests" section, "Special relationship with the one they call Satan." Yes, really.
I wanted to interview her, just to see what she'd actually say in person. My manager vetoed that, sadly.His mother handed it to me with him just quietly standing beside her, looking like this wasn’t his idea.We had a young woman apply for an entry-level software engineering job a couple years ago that had a Linktree URL in her application and resume. One of my coworkers was doing resume evaluations for our boss and opened the Linktree, finding links to an R-rated Twitter account, a PG-13 Insta, her Onlyfans, and to her content on several other porn sites. My coworker and boss were not amused, and they were debating whether someone was trolling the company or if it was a bizarre spam attempt. Her resume was rejected, and she was sent an automated "Thank you, good luck in your search, please try again in the future" email.
A few months later, we were advertising another open entry-level position when her resume came through again. My boss was doing the resume evals and recognized the name. He opened it a second time, while commenting to another of my coworkers about the inappropriate resume (he's not a perv, but was just surprised to see it again.) When my boss clicked the Linktree URL again to show the coworker, he was greeted with a perfectly normal collection of engineering links, including a link to her electronic resume, her LinkedIn, several projects she'd worked on, and a GitHub account.
Our best guess is that the applicant had accidentally copypasted the wrong Linktree URL the first time. She was still rejected for the second position. At that point, several employees had seen *everything*, and my boss decided that moving her resume forward for interviews would be inappropriate. Bit of a shame too. Solid GPA from a well-respected CS program, interesting projects, and a demonstrated ability to take on some absolutely massive workloads (sorry, I'm weak and couldn't resist.)
When applying for a job, please don't include links to your nudes. Aside from a handful of socially awkward software engineers, most of our people don't want to see them.
/edit: Lots of people seem hung up on the fact that we passed her over the second time. Let's clear a few things up.
1. There was nothing inappropriate about employees seeing her "material." These weren't private photos, and they weren't shared without permission. It was content she had voluntarily posted online, was actively sharing with the world, and then shared directly with our company. We didn't look it up. She sent it to us. There's also nothing wrong with our manager sharing it with other senior employees who were involved in the hiring process. Nobody was ogling her because she was naked and pretty. The Internet is full of naked and pretty women, and we all know where to find it if that's what we're looking for. It was shared because it was a weird mistake to make on a resume. We thought it was *funny* to see porn in an application.
2. At the end of the day, she made an unprofessional mistake that cost her any chance at an interview. She wasn't passed up because she was a sex worker. Our company leadership was fairly liberal and they wouldn't have held it against her. What she did was the professional equivalent of a guy forgetting to zip his pants and having his d**k peek out while he walked in for his interview. Doesn't matter that it was accidental. Doesn't matter that it was embarrassing. It was unprofessional, and some things can't be unseen. Dumb mistakes during the hiring process will keep you from being hired. She made a dumb mistake. It kept her from being hired. That's just how the world works.
3. Several people seem to have misunderstood one of my comments. We didn't realize that she'd probably made a mistake with the link until *after* she applied for the second position. When her first application was submitted and shared, we really didn't know what to make of it. My boss thought it was some kind of joke, or some kind of spam account gone wrong. Nobody believed it was a serious application until *after* the second application was received a couple of months later. That's when we put two and two together.
4. First impressions matter. A lot. When your first impression includes a link to a preview video of you riding a giant dildo, you cannot get mad when that's something that people associate with you afterward. Whether she intended it or not, that was her first impression.
5. She'd have been blocked once HR learned of the nude links anyway. Hiring someone after you'd seen their nudes would have been a legal nightmare. If Applicant A sends nudes and is hired, and Applicant B doesn't send nudes and is not hired, that would be a slam dunk sex discrimination case for Applicant B. How would the company prove that they *hadn't* preferentially hired Applicant A because of the sexual material they'd provided?Had a dude turn in his application with black marker lines redacting all of his info. Only things left were his name, a phone number, and a note saying "We can discuss these details during my interview."
He, in fact, did not get an interview.One resume I got while managing a head shop included how much he could bench and the characters he played in high school theater. He was in his late mid twenties.Like a lot of companies nowadays we do blind applications, no mention of age, gender, name, where you studied etc. allowed on the part that goes to people doing the evaluation.
We also attract a lot of applicants from prestigious universities, some of whom _really_ feel the need to find a way to mention the name of the institution in their competency answers as though it will help more than actually demonstrating that you are a good candidate for the job. Technically I could throw your application away, I usually won't unless you're especially obnoxious about it but it definitely does not help.
...oh but one person did add "MENSA IQ" to their application in response to a question that had no relation to such information and that did get rapidly dropped because that's a huge 'I'm going to be insufferable to work with' red flag.
*EDIT* oh and the personal statement that began with 'as a large language model...' didn't get very far.A couple we didn’t shred but definitely did not call and saved for future laughs:
- “Can cook anything related to a potato” (followed by the longest list of potato dishes I have ever seen and this job did not involve food in any form)
- In special memberships section: “Have a blockbuster card”Make sure you attach the right file. I once had somebody attach his court summons for a DUI charge. Instant deny.I once got a resume written in crayon.Had a guy put on his resume that he invented the dollar, owned Microsoft and Google and Ford, was an astronaut, and founded New Zealand.
This was when I managed an Aldi store and he was applying as an associate. But he was clear to say on his resume that our business model could be vastly improved with his expertise.
I *almost* brought him in for an interview just for fun, but I couldn’t really find the time along with the real applicants.They didn’t list a single job. Their only experience was several years of jiu jitsu.I once put that I ruled France from 1693-1702 with an iron fist, invented the letter G, was a world class Candyland player, and was a unicorn rancher in my cover letter.
The job was an IT position at an advertising company that went on and on about how creative everyone that works there is. After I listed my above accomplishments, I said, "OK. So maybe I haven't done all of those things listed above but I have (list of boring IT c**p)."
I got an email the next day from HR saying that was the best cover letter they had ever gotten and they'd hire me without even interviewing me based on it but they were a Mac business and all my experience was on Windows.Height, weight, marital status, religionI'm sure a lot of us have made mistakes on our CVs. I once changed my email address but forgot to change .co.uk to .com and the interviewer asked me about it at the end of an interview for a job I did not get.
The worst I've seen is from a girl named Clairfe. What an interesting name, is it Irish? My colleague showed me the application form handed in alongside the CV, where CLAIRE had managed to spell her own name right.I had someone once put “mom to child actor” and she listed that she homeschooled on set and managed their schedule and things of that nature
I had someone else who put “babysitting Daniel” she made him eat his vegetables among other things. It was cute.
My absolute favourite was a guy who wrote his attributes landscape in italics on a piece of paper that had a background of a unicorn on a cliff with a sunset. He came and asked for it back when he wasn’t hired.
