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

Talking about cover letters, when you write one of those, it's to highlight your qualities. Not to write about the company you're applying to. When I look at cover letters that say "I can't wait to work for your company and then they ramble on about the company for a full paragraph." I lose interest. More so when they quote directly either from our website or even the job posting.  I know all about the company I work for,  it's the person who's applying I want to read about.

Another no-no. Our company has several divisions. When apply for a job in my division don't ramble on in your cover letter about the other division and same thing during the interview. The only impression I'm going to get is that you want to work in the other division. So I won't hire you.  I remember one interview years ago, where I was explaining to a candidate what we do, and how we test graphics cards and after I was done I asked him if he had any questions, and he asks "Can I test network cards instead?"

The CV itself especially for a university student applying for an internship should not be more then 2 pages, If you've had that many jobs, the least important ones, should be reduced to one sentence. No one needs a full paragraph on a 2 month job you had at age 16. If the interviewer wants to know more about that job, after reading the date and job title, he will ask you. Using a bigger font to make your CV appear like it has more substance doesn't fool anyone either.

Look at it from a different perspective. Sometimes a manager might get a pile of 200 resumes to go through in a day or 2. There's no time to read everything you skim read. The CV's that are more difficult to read because of font size, formatting, layout or presentation definitely end up in the reject pile at that point to reduce the number of applicants to a manageable size.

One of the worst CV's I saw in this batch had to be the kid who other then stating his name, address, 2 email addresses,  fact he's graduating this April, only listed 6 notable classes he took in his bachelors program and their descriptions.  A brochure from the university would have been just as about as informative. It doesn't tell me anything specific about the candidate.

One of the funniest things I've seen on a resume in a long time has to be the kid who plays WOW. I mean if he said he was playing WOW and nothing else, that would be fine. It's what he says. "Work with guild of over 100 members to overcome many obstacles and achieve greatness".

I kid you not.

From the guild we know it's Alliance. We're considering joking with him at the interview, and saying "Sorry man, we only hire Horde players". Or "Sorry man, your gearscore is too low for this position".

One had a section on his CV called a "Key word index", under which he had [I'm presuming his] qualities written with no structure or text formatting.  I could also go on about bad formatting but that could be partly because all the resumes get collected and sometimes get submitted it one large word document by the University who submits it to our HR dept. Then there's the ones where you have to print them from the website, and the formatting there can be off and I can't tell if it's the fault of the website or applicant.