Man Used A Resume Filled With Nonsense & An Offensive Name To Apply For 100 Jobs — He Got 29 Calls For Interviews
It shows both how little time recruiters spend reading resumes and how much value privilege holds.
jakkapant turasen / Getty Images | Tassii from Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro If you've spent any time in the job market, you've likely been there — you craft a detailed, glowing resume highlighting your myriad accomplishments and talents only to hear nothing but crickets in return.
It's enough to make you think that no one is actually reading your resume in the first place, and a job search consultant's recent experiment revealed that that's pretty much precisely the case.
The consultant got 29 job interviews using a nonsensical resume with an offensive name.
Jerry Lee is a job search expert whose company, Wonsulting, provides guidance and resources for job seekers on how to network, optimize their resumes, and ace interviews.
After seeing a Redditor make wild claims that their absurd resume — which included stats like having spread an STI to 60% of their intern team, for example — got a 90% callback rate, he decided to conduct his own experiment to see if the Redditor could possibly have been telling the truth.
What he found was pretty shocking. While it seems like the Redditor was probably inflating their results, Lee nonetheless had major success with his own profane and silly resume.
It served to confirm a lot of what many have long suspected about the job search process: Recruiters aren't paying any attention to most of the details on our resumes — and elite privilege is enough to hide a multitude of sins when they do.
Lee's resume included a vulgar name, skills like 'arson,' and absurd credentials like 'nonstop crying in the office.'
"Put your recruiter hat on and read this resume," Lee wrote in a tweet about his experiment. "Would you give this person an interview?" He then posted a photo of the resume he created for a person named Kismma D. Nhuhts, or "kiss my… male dangly bits," if you will.
At first glance, it looks like a neat, tidy resume full of all kinds of sterling credentials — high-level jobs at Instagram, Google, and Amazon with lots of statistics and metrics that Kissmma D. Nhuhts had knocked out of the park.
But then Lee posted a version of the resume with some parts highlighted — some of which we've had to censor because of their hilariously adult nature. But even the good, clean, fun ones are delightfully ludicrous.
@JerryJHLee / X
Part of Mr. (or Ms! Who knows!) Nhuhts' job at Google, for example, was using "photos of my dog winning the World Cup" to improve Google's photo identification accuracy.
At Amazon, Mr. or Ms. Nhuhts successfully raised "average coffee break time" by 300% by "nonstop crying" in the main office area. And as for Kismma's skills? "Adult entertainment," "arson," and "Mia Khalifa" were among those who got Lee 29 interviews, some of them with huge Fortune 500 companies.
Lee's experiment showed what recruiters actually focus on when reading resumes — as well as what we already know about how privilege affects the job search.
A closer glance at Lee's resume, especially in the education section, gives some insight into how he was so successful despite his resume, including jobs working on projects like "Amazon Dating" that don't even exist.
Namely, Kismma D. Nhuhts' degree from Stanford University, one of the most elite institutions in the world, and their job history composed almost entirely of so-called FAANG companies — the acronym for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google — the five most powerful tech companies in the world that tend to hire exclusively from elite circles.
Basically, it confirmed that the right fancy credentials will push you to the front of the line every time, no matter what your resume says. However, it also confirmed what Lee discovered in a previous experiment, which indicated which details we should focus on when crafting our resumes.
It's long been said that recruiters spend an average of just six seconds reading a resume, so Lee decided to use eye-tracking software to get to the bottom of what recruiters are looking to jump out at them in that wildly brief amount of time. He found they tend to only look at the most basic details like employers, job titles, key dates, and statistics. And crucially, they spend the most time reading the top-most section.
For Mr. or Ms. Nhuhts, that means recruiters likely glanced at their stellar-looking most recent job at Instagram, and that was enough for them to miss the hilariously profane, silly, and nonsensical details in every other section of the resume.
Or, as Lee summarized it in a tweet, "as long as your resume looks like a good resume" with "clear job titles" and "80%+ of your bullet points … have numbers," recruiters will likely at least take you seriously and give you a glance.
Annoying, unfair, and cynical? Sure. But so is the entire job search process, start to finish. And particularly for those who tend to create more verbose resumes (me, I'm talking about me), it's good to know that simplicity, numbers, and clarity are what really make the difference — even if one of your most finely honed skills is "arson."
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.