Resumes: Is It Always Good to Get Noticed?

photo via huffington post

Every few months there is a resume that makes the rounds online that gets people talking.  Remember the video resume for the guy applying to UBS showing him bench pressing 400 pounds?  That didn’t turn out too well for him.

The Huffington Post recently posted Eric’s resume (seen above) and asked whether it was a ‘win or fail.’

Standing out and getting attention is a great thing (almost always).  Especially when someone is going to be weeding through hundreds of resumes – more than half of which are completely irrelevant for the job.

Eric’s resume is moderately amusing and it had the potential to be good.  But, it’s not.

Simply by focusing on one or two themes and twisting a few things around he could have gotten just about any entry-level job he wanted.

Rather than tying his attributes and experiences back to something even remotely relevant to working, he went beyond non-sensical and landed in the ‘don’t trust me not to run with scissors in my hands’ area.

At first glance he could have gone the route of saying he’s a quick learner with tremendous focus (e.g. mastered MarioKart in one 18-hour marathon session).

And ‘trust me’ isn’t a great response for explaining away a lack of past drive, focus and success.  There aren’t too many gigs that ask for people who are proficient at ‘daydreaming out window (sic).’

Moral of the story: don’t be afraid to be different.  Sometimes it’s the best way to get noticed.  But make sure your irreverence is intelligently irreverent.  Make the person reading your resume think ‘this person is pretty funny, I’d like to meet him/her,’ not ‘wow, I hope someone’s keeping an eye on this kid making sure he’s taking his meds.’

Resume Fail.

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