Job Interviewers Reveal Resume Moments That Either Got The Person Immediately Hired Or Immediately Rejected (30 Answers)

Of course, these stories are all good examples of why it can be hard to reduce a person to just a few lines of text. Just as a gravestone can’t capture the full essence of a life, a resume is at best just a snapshot, yet we allow it to dictate so much of our lives and futures. The word resume itself just means “to summarize” in French, yet we allow these summaries to decide entire careers. It’s as if the back of a book would be the number one decider in whether people read it or leave it on the shelf. 

Despite the French name, Renaissance genius, artist, and inverter Leonardo da Vinci is credited with inventing the first resume, in the form of a letter to potential employers. So just to be clear, a man who was era-defining in multiple fields still needed to write out a brief biography of himself just to maybe get a job. 

Some of the examples here listed things like how much they could bench, random physical features, and assorted fun facts. While it may seem strange, that was the norm in the last century, as a resume would be a sort of alternative or stand-in for a referral from someone who knew you. So maybe these resumes were simply doing it old school and didn’t want to conform to the monolithic professional standards everyone else follows. 

Now we can just Google a person and find out all sorts of things unless they keep a shallow digital footprint, but in the pre-internet age, it was pretty normal to send a letter or letters of introduction to get the ball rolling. We still use cover letters, but these evolved from an older tradition where a known third party would give someone a letter from a stranger in the hope that they would find some interest in them. 

These days, some applicants try to get creative, to stand out from the crowd. In some countries, the numbers are almost astronomical. In India, around 220500000 applications were filed for government jobs, of which only 722000 were recommended for the next interview steps between 2014 and 2022. So getting someone to even look at your resume can feel like a challenge in itself. 

As a result, people have started to make multimedia applications, using videos, songs and even skywriting. Creative, yes, but we all know that constantly rewinding a video to catch a piece of information is a lot more annoying than finding it in some text. And making a hiring manager annoyed seems like a pretty bad choice, all things considered, unless the position is literally related to video editing and creation or some more creative field.