Part of my job includes sifting through resumes to weed out the completely lame or inappropriate. You'd think that the average person would realize that, when looking for a job, it's generally a good idea to try to impress your prospective employer. Perhaps you use a few words that have more than one syllable? Or opt out of the text message lingo (I'd wager most established employers will not understand or appreciate a cover letter that begins: wot up Dawg! I herd u r hiring?). But it seems that today's unemployed college graduates are too busy picking lint out of the dimples in their beer-bellies to put much effort into their first impressions. When they're inexplicably invited to the office for an interview, more often than not they react as though this was the inevitable outcome of their awe-inspiring existence and that I should be honored to be the one to usher them into this next stage of their lives.
Then there are the women. Oh, the women. Perhaps they assume that since short skirts and pony tails worked so well on their portly, balding, cuckolded professors that their bubbly cuteness precludes them from having to have any substance to their personalities. They gush about their excitement over the possibility of working at this company as though the building were made of gingersnaps and soy lattes. At first these applications seem appealing, based solely on the level of passion they display towards the position. That is, until you realize that between those ribbon-encased pigtails and behind that industrial sized rainbow lollipop, there's a great, vacuous bubble where a brain should be. Also, smileys have no place on a resume unless your face looks like this:
