electricland

Dear candidates:

I know it's a tough job market out there. I do know. You know how I know? Foot-high stacks of applications. But for heaven's sake...

Please, please try to make sure that you have some kind of minimum qualification for the job you are applying for. Ideally, SOMETHING on your CV should have some kind of tangential relationship to the job. Anything at all. Please?

If your CV makes my eyeballs bleed, it's not going to make it very high in the pile. If there are 50 applicants for the position, why would I waste time on the one whose CV is illegible?

And the same goes for cover letters. Paragraph breaks are your friends! Left alignment is your friend! Nine-point type and half-inch margins are not your friends!

Yes, you should have a cover letter, and it should say more than "Please find attached my CV. I look forward to discussing my candidacy with you."

And you should proofread it for embarrassing typos.

And you really should make some token effort to customize it for the recipient. If you are applying to a not-for-profit organization, just for instance, you should probably take out the boilerplate about helping to maximize profits.

Generally speaking, impenetrable MBA-speak is only impressive to other MBAs. And actually I'm not so sure about them.

The languages you speak and the software you can use are potentially of interest to me. Your marital status is... really not.

Speaking of the last, O Readers, what are your thoughts on listing hobbies in a resume? I'm generally against it, unless of course they have some relevance, but I can't think of any situations where they would. Volunteer activities, totally fine. I just don't need to know someone is a yoga devotee or played clarinet in their high school orchestra, y'know?