25 Hiring Managers Share What Makes A Resume Immediately Worthless To Them

Mentioning Jesus (in a cover letter). You might think I'm kidding, but it happened. The applicant was telling a bit about herself (fine) and mentioned how she was involved in her church (fine). But then she said how Jesus is her lord and savior. I'm fine with someone having strong religious convictions, but when you're applying for a non-religious job, it's not appropriate to put it in your cover letter. To me, it tells me that you're not able to separate religion from work. It also makes me wonder if this will be the gal at the water cooler preaching to others. Also, and maybe I'm biased, it immediately makes me think that you think you're better than others, especially us lowly heathens.

Former hiring manager here. I tossed MULTIPLE resumes that used text message abbreviations throughout the resume and cover letter and one that included emojis. While you can do pretty much anything from your phone- it doesn’t mean you should.

On a more lightweight tone than most of the other comments:

I once received an application from a man in in 60s. Solid CV, lots of experience.

In his covering letter he wrote "I'm applying because the Job Centre asked me to. Please note that I intend to retire in 6 months time".

We had a good laugh, then sent him a very polite rejection letter and wished him a great retirement.

It’s been a long time but I used to do hiring for a cinema. Staff were often young, for many it was a first job, making popcorn and selling tickets type of gig.

I would not pursue anything where parents came in with a CV for their teenager or if parents were contacting me on behalf of their teen. Big red flag. Either their kid didn’t want he job in the first place or they’re incapable of taking initiative and it doesn’t bode well for how they’d be as an employee.

Typos, especially with homophones which don’t usually get flagged by Microsoft Word. I’d love to be forgiving with the English language because it’s hard to be perfect even for native speakers.

However, I hire for library positions. When librarians catalog materials, switched letters or numbers may lose a book in the system entirely. Mixing up homophones may mean a patron can’t find the book they need. Librarians proofread manual catalog categories to catch errors and then catch more errors in practice. “Pobody’s nerfect” and all, but the résumé shows me how a person pays attention to these details at their very best with all the time they could possibly need. If there are mistakes, and that’s their absolute best, it’s probably not a fit.

That said, if I can excuse an error in a cover letter I will. Cover letters are annoying and time-consuming to write.

In 2012 I got a resume for a potential intern that I will never forget. I received a pack of about 80 resumes for intern candidates from a certain university. One resume stood out. The entire resume was MyLittlePony themed. There were MLP pictures plastered all over. There was a bar graph of skill proficiency and things like "friendship" and "caring" were listed. The candidate had a picture of himself with MLP characters photoshopped in around him. The worst part was that a lot of the verbiage had cringy baby-babble such as "wike" instead of like.

We didn't call that guy in for an interview.

Misspelling the name of the company they are applying to. I can stomach a common typo elsewhere but that’s one to get right.

When they just copy and paste a whole phrase from the company website.

I have to hire cafe cashiers regularly and have read too many resumes saying how they are good at 'creating exceptional dining experiences, driving profitability for our franchises, and leading the industry through innovative concepts and proven strategies.'

I would prefer someone who says 'I'm punctual, I live close to the store and can carry heavy stuff'

« Very meticulous and attentive to detials. »

Not me, but my prior construction superintendent threw away three immigrant's applications for supposedly all using the same social security number.

Pronouns other than he/she/they etc... A department I work with hired someone with some exotic pronoun they put on their resume and they ended up being the weirdest person and very difficult to work with. Every little thing was a personal attack on this person.

Reference to drama such as "my previous boss was a bully" or "I didnt get the chance I deserved".

No time for drama, there's more than enough of that.

Not a hiring manager but I help decide who should/shouldn't get the job.

We've had a lot of essays. The record was I think 10 pages long as to why we should hire them.

It was very disorganized, hard to read with spelling/grammatical errors. It was hard to understand.

I understand occasional but no, there were a ton. It's for a waiter position.

The only time I have ever had to throw out a resume was because someone possibly had it in a bag with their lunch and the paper was soaking wet and dissolving as I tried to unfold it. It was just unacceptable to process. The application was left in a drop box so I don’t know if it was a prank or an actual applicant.

I'll usually still interview unless there is no relevant experience, but I've seen some atrocious resumes. I've seen people use crutchwords like "uh" in writing for a job description. I've also seen a sentence 4 lines long with zero punctuation. The same resume will have "attention to detail" as a skill set. I've interviewed for one of those resumes, and the applicant said "I dunno" to about 80% of my questions, and it turned out he didn't even know what job he applied for.

It's not that I'm overly picky, but if someone can't spend the 20 minutes or less that it takes to proof read their resume, are they going to put alot of effort into their job? Maybe, but it's hard to know.

I used to work in video games doing art. So the brought me in to do portfolio reviews. If they could not draw well, regardless of education, I rejected them. It also showed me that San Francisco Art Institute was nearly worthless.

I once had someone list their "MENSA IQ" - immediate red flag that they will be absolutely insufferable, probably insecure and (perhaps ironically) more likely to be an idiot.

...also where I work we strip out all details that could bias an application. When reviewing your answers I don't know your name, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation or where you went to school (though I do know your grades) and we make it clear when you apply that this is the case and that you shouldn't put that information in the written portions of your application that I will see. The amount of people who went to prestigious universities who then quite obviously (sometimes repeatedly) work the name of the school into the text of their applications because they feel it will give them greater cachet is remarkable. I won't throw the application away if you shamelessly do that but it definitely doesn't help.

One time I had someone upload how to upload their resume from Dropbox instead of their resume.

This doesn’t matter 100% of the time but bad formatting. If it’s hard to read I probably won’t read it.

Too many jobs in too short a time.

Says they’re either getting canned a lot, can’t work effectively on a team, or they are chasing tiny raises the second they’re trained.

Pass on all 3.