Amusing mistakes in CVs I’ve reviewed, #1

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As I’ve mentioned before, I end up reviewing a lot of CVs (resumes) as part of my day job. Sometimes people make mistakes on their CVs and sometimes those mistakes can be quite funny.

Here are some I’ve seen recently – I’m sure this won’t be the last post in this series. The quotes are all from real CVs, hopefully sufficiently anonymised to protect the guilty.

Creation of a hybrid Scum of Scrums as the team increases

I’m sure this was a typo, and not a pejorative for “Scrum of Scrums”, but still. Proofread your CV.

A [subject] graduate with outstanding academic knowledge, capabilities and a vast array of transferable skills acquired from experiences in industry, sports teams at a reasonably high level and life itself from a day-to-day basis

I’m glad you have experience from “life itself”, but that is about the most vague way possible to open your CV. You’re meant to be telling me about what specific experience your life has brought you.

I am quite possibly the most diverse engineer you will ever meet

Really? If you’d omitted the “quite possibly” I’d think this resume was submitted by one D. Trump. (And yes, it was a CV for a role in the US)

The world is changing – the boundaries of technology stacks(open source/closed source), business verticles(ToB/ToC), nationalities, as well as locations(online/offline, onsite/remote), are all disappearing

Thus began a seven page diatribe of a CV, full of dense impenetrable text that left me wondering if this was a test in an AI system that was designed to generate CVs (badly). All the mistakes in spelling and formatting were in the original. It was great for a laugh, but not the right way to go about getting a job.