Been job-hunting lately? I bet you've gotten stressed out over preparing a convincing, professional-looking resume.
To relieve some of this stress, why prepare an alternate resume, one in which you're completely candid? Talk about how great you are, how employers should be falling over themselves to hire you. Tell jokes. Draw pictures. As long as you're able to remain decent, don't hold anything back. Write the resume you WANT to write.
Now, pick out several employers whose jobs you would never, ever want, and send it to them. Better yet, make appointments with their Human Resource offices and present your resume in person. Be sure to dress and behave well, so they take you seriously up till the last moment.
Doing this a few times should loosen you up. You'll stop worrying about impressing people. You'll be your real, charming, effective self, and get the great job you deserve. You won't be like me, sitting up till four a.m. typing silly messages on a website.-- Ander, Jul 26 2000 Lexicon of Inconspicuously Ambiguous Recommendations (LIAR) http://www.ewin.com/articles/liar.htmFor your lucky references... [rmutt, Jul 26 2000, last modified Oct 05 2004] (?) Unusually honest "Job Wanted" ad. http://www.clock.or...LOYMENT_WANTED1.jpg"... co-owned and participated in the executive-level management of 120 people worldwide in a successful pot smuggling venture ..." [jutta, Jul 26 2000] The World's Most Mentally Ill Job Resume http://www.drunkbastard.net/resume.htmCourtesy memepool. [egnor, Jul 26 2000, last modified Oct 05 2004] (??) Most irritating CV ever. (Flash required.) http://213.186.36.1.../alstudio/cv/en.htmAgain via memepool. An animated cartoon of the author singing while past projects flash by in the background. With a strong French accent. Accompanied by a banjo. [jutta, Nov 17 2004] Strong contender. http://web.archive....com/~dogman/resume/Objective: "Find a job where the people I work with aren't all against me." [jutta, Nov 23 2004] George Costanza http://www.youtube....watch?v=IjXUgxR4Z10the opposite; check out the job interview at about 4:50 near the end. [jaksplat, Dec 27 2008] If you really don't want the job, just send them my resume.
(Let's see *you* try getting a good job with a name like "Uncle Nutsy"...)-- Uncle Nutsy, Jul 26 2000 I got a job once because I had "juggling" listed as an 'other interest'. The interviewer walked in and threw 3 beanbags down on the table while challenging: "Says here you can juggle....Let's see what you got."
Turns out one of the other guys in the group was a semi-professional juggler. that was enough to single me out. (BTW this was a computer IT support type job...not advertising or party planning where personality and creativity are a plus.)-- blahginger, Jul 26 2000 Right now I'm working at a computer consulting company, placing programmers in temp and permanent positions. I read half a hundred resumes every day. If someone sent a resume that showed that they had a lot of experience and also was funny, strange, or even moderately interesting, I'd jump all over it. Hell, if someone even sent a resume that provided convincing evidence that they could spell, punctuate, and capitalize, I'd be very, very happy. One with a little green alien would make my day.-- mcfrank, Aug 09 2000 Three months? My life flashes before my eyes within the first fifteen minutes. I did this [crappy resume] a number of years ago to continue to collect unemployment benefits-Wait! There's a reason! I had been in a terrible accident years before and had headaches around the clock nonstop for 3 years...Really needed the rest and had to have some form of income. Have recuperated to the extent that I go 5 years without vacations. Year 4 and counting, now.-- thumbwax, Sep 18 2000 On my resume, employers are less than delighted to read that I was employed by the Texas Workforce commission as a Job Applicant for three months in '99 (translation=unemployment leech) and as for education, I was proudly rejected for both early and regular admissions to the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art for the spring semester of '99...truth hurts.-- julien, Oct 06 2000 ah, whats a resume?-- wrenchndmachine, Oct 07 2000 egnor: If you'll give me a writing or editing job, I'll gladly make you a one of those résumés. (I realize it's usually done the other way around, but as you posted your annotation in July, I figure you'd want me to start as soon as possible.)-- Ander, Oct 13 2000 I turned in an application to Arby's with Pirates and stick figures that I drew. They didn't call back.-- AfroAssault, Nov 17 2000 I've decided to actually try this. Please let me know if you want to hear the details of this experiment, though you can assume I'll be bummed out if some dupe actually wants to hire me as a result. I HATE jobs! They're just...too much work.-- rachele, Jan 30 2001 So he's nine years old?-- beauxeault, Mar 21 2001 wrenchndmachine: a CV
rachele: any news?-- al, Mar 28 2001 Rods Tiger: I recommend that you go for a more conventional layout. Starting with a recommendation is not the proper way to do it and might confuse people short on time - these days I start off with personal information, a skill summary followed by an education summary that leads into employment details. By breaking convention you risk confusing people and making the content hard to extract.-- Aristotle, Mar 28 2001 Sorry if the stuff below seems picky and critical - I'm trying to help, honest! And I have read hundreds of CVs over the past year...Starting sentences with "Has", "Invented", "Known", "Pioneered", etc. is off-putting. Either use real sentences or if you're compiling a list, make it a list.Contact information should go at the top.Too many fonts for my liking - Bold, bold italic and normal sans serif and serif for the text. Try just normal serif text throughout or just normal sans serif text throughout. From anyone involved in web design work, I'd hope for a classier-looking document.It's a little too long - I don't really want to know a lot of detail on what you did more than 10 years ago or on any job which isn't relevant to the kind of job you want.It's unclear what your relationship is with ColourByNumbers - your CV says you stopped working for them in March, but they let you put your CV on their website?-- hippo, Mar 28 2001 Rods Tiger, many of your ideas here are much better written than that resume. Maybe take it down a notch?
You cannot invent an archetype. Immersive imaging does not exist. XML is not an approach. Website creation cannot be like a paradigm. Looping the whole into the gestalt? What?
The wankometer gave the resume a 0.0, but I think that's because it must have overloaded and crashed.-- ping, Mar 28 2001 You don't need to follow MS Word's template as that one is particularlity daft. The trick is to look at other people's C.V. and get some books out from the library to combine effective, appropriate communication with a standard approach so people can find what they are looking for. I take the view that people generaly have only a very small window to look at any C.V. before they either decide to examine it in detail or throw it away in dismay.-- Aristotle, Mar 29 2001 Echoing wrenchandmachine's annotation of Oct 07, 'What's a CV?'
I mean what does it stand for, not 'It's a resume'.-- StarChaser, Mar 31 2001 Ah, so desu. Thanks...-- StarChaser, Mar 31 2001 In a recent job interview Lori Z was asked whether the glass was half empty or half full. She answered "yes". She didn't get the job.
Many years ago, Lori Z had just transferred to Big Blue U., and was taking a placement test for their English department. She was asked to write an essay on whether academic cheating is OK. She answered in the affirmative (Lori Z loves to test people). Apparently they graded on some criterion other than political correctness, as Lori Z placed out of freshperson comp. People ridicule academia for political correctness and the thought police and the like, but I swear there's less freedom of opinion in the private sector.-- LoriZ, Jun 02 2001 LoriZ, You should have just said the glass is twice the size it needs to be.-- bohemian max, Jun 03 2001 There are also people who need to help but whose help is neither needed nor wanted by others. They might even include some of the same people as mentioned in this annotation's predecessor.-- LoriZ, Sep 01 2001 Peter... i love the "resident alien bit"... i have been told i'm easily amused, but the first time i saw it i must have laughed for five minutes straight...-- Urania, Oct 11 2001 Notice the Canadian address on jutta's link...-- RayfordSteele, Mar 22 2002 When I first started at uni and was looking for part time work I was so sick of people not responding to my usual, bland, CV that I decided to do just that. I'd already applied for around ten jobs with no success, so applied for a job at my local Staples store with the following answers,
Hobbies and interests:
Playing the guitar, playing football, hiding.
Describe, in your own words, why you would like to work for Staples:
recknock re edacifiy chumpa rithulse er theaw vbe oqiuest neiset blocnch. (I used my own words)
I got the job. Luckily for me, the boss was a woman with a wicked sense of humour. My interview lasted like half an hour because we were talking about vikings and penguins. She told me she'd once employed somebody simply because they put down they like reading Terry Pratchett novels on their CV.
I reckon if you're gonna send out ten CVs', you might as well take a chance with one or two.-- aaarrrggh, Apr 27 2002 When asked about long time periods between jobs, I like to reply.....
" I took some time off to establish myself as a porn star"-- normzone, Dec 30 2003 i once saw someone hand in a "resume" at a career fair that was just a crayon drawing of a robot.-- omegatron, Jul 07 2004 Your hired!!! Here - have a bun.-- energy guy, Jul 08 2004 When I've been job hunting I always make sure to apply for one that I'm a little to qualified for just to get an interview under my belt before the real thing. Works wonders. Iron out the wrincles in your performance and work on keepiong a straight face to the answer of "what's your biggest fault..."
I once was offered a job on the spot with a company car and asked to take it for a test drive... problem was I can't drive, so I just had to talk my way out of it. Felt great going into the real interview though.-- liamdelahunty, Jul 09 2004 Incidentally, it was this idea that came up in a search engine that initially illuminated this site's presence to me. I forget what I was searching for.
I actually implemented this idea recently. And so the circle is complete.-- harderthanjesus, Nov 24 2004 Heh-- Dub, Aug 04 2006 See the resume is the easy part. The mandatory piss test is the part that's tough to pass.-- RayzaBlayd, Aug 04 2006 That strong contender thing made me laugh because there's someone out there with a worse resume, or work history, than mine! :)-- quantum_flux, Nov 30 2007 The confidence builder prior to a real interview is a real plus. A few years ago I attended a group interview for a mobile company. They asked me what motto I lived by and how that helps in the workplace. "Act now and ask for forgiveness later. It cuts through middle management log rolling and builds productivity."
Quite a good feeling saying what you really want to.-- sprogga, Nov 30 2007 //Lori Z was asked whether the glass was half empty or half full. She answered "yes". She didn't get the job.//Obviously not the sort of job one would want, when "yes" is the correct answer. In an interview if I asked you "What is one and one", and you replied "two", you wouldn't get the job.-- AbsintheWithoutLeave, Dec 27 2008 random, halfbakery