dmorin's Journal: Resume horror stories

When my job search began in January I updated my resume and started sending it out. Then I was told by enough close friends the importance of the "seeding your resume with buzzwords" game that I tweaked and twisted and basically reworked some things to make sure that my resume was more buzzword dense.

And discovered weeks later that I was still sending out the old version. I was upset with myself.

Over the past two weeks I've been using an outplacement service (that my company is paying for). I just discovered that not only does my resume print badly, leaving half a page of whitespace on the first page, but it actually CUTS CONTENT OUT. A whole section of my resume does not print. Now I'm *really* upset. But I got an interview out of that one, so it can't have been too much of a deal breaker. But I do have a new version that prints nicely.

Just today a friend sent me his resume to pass along to a job I wasn't suited for. Which I did. Then three seconds later he said "Shoot, wrong cell phone number", corrected it and sent it to me again. So the first look at this guy that the job gets is a double resume because the first one had a mistake in it.

My outplacement guy tells me that the worst resume story he ever had was when a guy brought his in for assistance, and the admin folks reformatted it into their system and gave it back to him for proofing. He said "You got my email and phone number wrong." so they went back to the original he'd given them and it turns out he had both of them wrong on his original. His original that he had been circulating for 3 weeks. That's gotta suck.

Others?

Multiple Resumes

[lucasw]

I maintain two copies, one in plain text formatted so it can be cut and pasted into web forms or emails that are frequently very narrow and have little capacity to handle complex formatting or even line breaks, and another in rtf that fits onto two sides of a single piece of paper and has a little thought put into actual looks (bolds, indentation).

The text one has to make it past keyword scanning filters etc. so can be longer and wordier than normally, though in my case they're still the same. Sometimes this backfires, because I've had a couple times when someone has skimmed my resume and seen a reference that works at BIG COMPANY and they ask me: "So, you worked for BIG COMPANY?" and then are put-off when I have to explain why:
(1)I haven't the experience they think I have (and perhaps negate the whole reason they were impressed with my resume and bothered to contact me).
(2)I'm not lying on my resume, and that it's their fault for thinking wrongly.
It's just not a positive good way to start things out...

But for both of them- always print them out- a lot of stupid errors will pop out that way. WYSIWYG still hasn't been achieved for some printer/text-editor combinations...

Re:Multiple Resumes

[dmorin]

skimmed my resume and seen a reference that works at BIG COMPANY

A friend at work espouses the theory that you should fill your resume with stuff like "Did not work with J2EE, WebSphere and BEA Weblogic." It'll trigger the keyword filters better, but you're plainly telling them the truth. :) You just have to hope that having gotten their attention you can keep it with what you *did* do.

I wouldn't do it quite so blatantly, but there's something to that theory. For instance there's a line in mine that say

Re:Multiple Resumes

[lucasw]

It's a good strategy if you have the abilitity to smooth-talk your way into a job, but I suspect increasingly very few will have patience for that sort of thing once it makes it past the filters and onto their desk/in-box.

I've seen companies complaing about being flooded with resumes from people who aren't qualified, while at the same time I apply for jobs I'm not completely qualified for because I know the jobs I could do are being flooded with equally qualified applicants, so I have to increase my odds b