Top 10 Resume Blunders

By Anne Fisher, Fortune senior writer

You’ve worked hard on your resume, trying to squeeze all your experience in
and make yourself stand out from the crowd, and chances are you’ve done a
pretty good job. But even if your resume isn’t perfect, it’s unlikely to
include any real howlers.

Not everybody can say that. Job site CareerBuilders.com recently asked
pollsters Harris Interactive to survey hiring managers and find out the
wackiest resume items they’ve seen lately. Out of 2,627 responses, here are
the top ten:

A job candidate…

1. … attached a letter from her mother.

2. … used pale blue paper with teddy bears printed around the border.

3. … explained a three-month gap in employment by saying that he was
getting over the death of his cat.

4. … specified that his availability to work Fridays, Saturdays, or
Sundays is limited because the weekends are “drinking time.”

5. … included a picture of herself in a cheerleading uniform.

6. … drew a picture of a car on the outside of the envelope and said the
car would be a gift to the hiring manager.

7. … listed hobbies that included sitting on a levee at night watching
alligators.

8. … mentioned the fact that her sister had once won a strawberry-eating
contest.

9. … stated that he works well in the nude.

10. … explained an arrest record by stating, “We stole a pig, but it was a
really small pig.”

Feel better now?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s