How To Create A Completely Unhirable Resume
By: Justin Streight
Tags: Advice, Careers, Job Hunting, Satire, Humor

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

My cover letters all start with an apology.

Over-educated. Under-experienced. Independent, with large streaks of “freelance” work. Juggling under special skills. Foreign references. And no specialization at all.

There are certain things that hiring managers are looking for.

I don’t know what they are.

But using a vast supply of personally obtained data, I can tell you a few things that they are definitely not looking for. And if you have them… well, it’s time to build a time machine.

Foreign Work Experience

“I can give you some references, but they phone number will be 17 digits long and the person does not speak English.”

I graduated at the height of the financial crisis, because I’m an idiot.

Like many people of my generation, I fled America to teach English in exotic lands for money. My degree wasn’t in English or education. I had no real interest in teaching.

You might think generic foreign work experience is a good thing to have on a resume.

It appears that it is not.

Hiring managers seem to understand that people who left to teach English usually weren’t “teachers” as much as they were “teaching assistants” or “people who occasionally spoke English words aloud so kids could know what the words sounded like.”

Fair enough.

Freelancing

“If you’re asking if I can wake up in the morning and commute to an office 5 days a week, then the answer is ‘yes’ …. I mean, probably.”

I was a writer on a website too, kind of like this. And like this, I was not an employee.

I also wasn’t an employee for the other website I wrote on. Or for the smaller gigs I occasionally (rarely) manage to get. I was a freelancer, and hiring managers hate that.

In the mind’s eye of every hiring manager is the image of a freelancer walking into the office at noon, slapping their boss across the face and demanding $300 an hour.

How could one settle into the life of an office drone after the never-ending freedom party that is scrounging for contracts?

Sadly, I have no answer.

No Clear Specialization

“I don’t know who you are, hiring manager. I don’t know what you want out of a hire. But I do have are a very particular set of completely unrelated skills. Skills I have acquired over a meandering, incoherent career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.”

I like to dabble; I like to say. Either that or that I’ve been on a multi-year career-finding journey of the soul.

Really, I’ve just taken a lot of different jobs, and I have learned some things.

Now, I’m looking for the perfect job that will combine my aptitude for writing, juggling and driving a car with my expertise in public policy and the two months I spent learning coding on Khan Academy.

I haven’t found that perfect spot for me.

At least, not yet.

Layered Timeline

“Why would one job have to begin when the other one ends? And what’s wrong with three jobs at the same time? That’s triple the job experience I put down.”

Hiring managers like single lined, simple timelines with one job that lasts 10 years and happens to be the exact job the person is applying for, I assume.

Having to interpret multi-layer, complex job histories with gaps and overlapping is apparently frowned upon. Likewise, it’s probably better if you can answer questions like “when did you start working at (blank).”

Unfortunately, I cannot.

Like a murderer with a poor memory, I simply don’t know where I was at what time without having a paper in front of me with the answers.

But is that really so wrong?