What not to put in a resume when applying for an internship - Part I

My department hires engineering interns from universities around Montreal, and we've been known sometimes to get students from universities in Sherbrooke, Quebec City and Ottawa. Since the jobs in my department are technician jobs rather then engineering jobs, I have found that first and second year COOP students looking for a first internship are the best choice.

I'm not sure if it's a sign of the times but I had twice the amount of 3rd & 4rth year students applying for these very "junior" positions especially from schools without COOP programs.I tend to weed those out because I've found over the years a percentage of students close to graduation feel that their skills are underutilized in my department and somehow think after they were hired for one job that we could give them something more interesting to do. When we tell them this is the job they are stuck with for 4 months, that's when the productivity goes way way down.

To avoid having unmotivated students, I tend to chose the most inexperienced. Those who have not had an opportunity to work in the computer or electronics field are my first choices. They are the ones who appreciate the opportunity to work with us the most. In return they are the ones who stand to gain the most from working with us.

I generally judge the candidate on their personality rather then on their experience. I like to choose those who are willing to learn and do any task assigned to them and do it well. Someone who's work I can trust, who won't lie about the work they did or ignore problems to finish on time. When I interview I like honest answers. I do ask questions about PC's and the windows environment to gauge the level of skills because while all the positions are junior some are more junior then others. If someone doesn't know the answer I expect an I don't know. Not some bullshit answer to try to hide the fact that they don't know. I do quality assurance I can't hire someone who will lie about the quality of the product.

When I get a pile of CV's the first thing I do is check the GPA's. Unless the student has either 2.6/4.0 or 2.9/4.3 minimum GPA I can't hire them. [I don't agree with this policy but I can't fight it either]  The next step I check if they are first or second year.  

Out of 32 received CV's from one university, I had 10 left after this filtering.  I also filtered out the guy who used such a funky font that it was unreadable for me. Here's a tip, when writing a CV use a common font like ariel, or times new roman and never smaller then a 10 point. They aren't pretty fonts but they print nice from any word processor on any PC.   

There was the guy who addressed his CV to a company other then ours in his cover letter. That's a pretty big no-no especially for a QA job. If you're spacey by nature, best not to mention any company and make your cover letter a bit more general.

...will continue tomorrow.