The Best of the Worst Job Applications

While it’s only January, hiring season is quickly approaching. To prepare you for the onslaught of résumés and cover letters, we thought we’d offer you a humorous look at some other hiring managers’ “best of the worst” employment applications, collected from every corner of the World Wide Web. Are they true? We can’t say for sure, but they’re certainly entertaining.

• There’s the classic misspelling error from an applicant who claimed to be “detail-oreinted," or from someone who would like to be a cook but claimed instead to be a male chicken.
• This allegedly real résumé reads like a bad superhero character analysis. “Eric’s” objective is to “to claw [his] way to the top by whatever means necessary,” while his skills include “cat-like reflexes” and “emit[ting] pleasant aromas.”
• A man was so aggravated at having been repeatedly turned down for a position that he attached a former employee’s recent death certificate to his résumé, claiming that he “caught [the employer] red-handed” and that the company “had no excuse” not to hire him now—because there was clearly a vacancy available. (No word on whether he actually got the job.)
• While filling out a digital job application, one woman accidentally attached a rather manic picture of actor Nicholas Cage instead of her résumé to the online form. She never heard back about the job, but did give the internet a chuckle at her expense on her Tumblr blog after she realized her error.
• This man restyled his entire résumé to resemble a “My Little Pony” cartoon.
• One applicant couldn’t cut the apron strings and included a letter of recommendation from his mother.

We hope this list made you chuckle and brought a little sunshine to your short winter days. With any luck, your own applicant pool this spring won’t contain any of these doozies!

Additional ISM resources:
The Source for School Heads Vol. 13 No. 1 Comprehensive Interviewing: Phone Interviews
The Source for School Heads Vol. 13 No. 4 Comprehensive Interviewing: In-Person Interviews
The Source for Business Managers Vol. 14 No. 3 Red Flags on Résumés
The Source for School Heads Vol. 13 No. 6 The Absolute Worst Interview Questions—And What to Ask Instead

Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 28 No. 16 Hiring and Orienting Your New Advisors
I&P Vol. 40 No. 8 Preparing Your School's Families for New Teachers
I&P Vol. 40 No. 13 The Business Manager as a Change Agent