MTK Part 2 (Résumé-Gate)

What’s worse than having cheerful and supportive parents acting as your job agents? Well, encountering an HR department who actually refuses resumes for one.

What kind of an human resource department wants a resume with a bigger font? (image courtesy of sxc.hu)

My dad has been quite the unhinged among the two and can’t seem to trust me enough to let me experience failure and find success on my own endeavours. Just the past week, he asked me (or demanded) that I go to him at his workplace and submit personally my credentials to their human resource department for a job order in one of the offices in the department. While the job seems quite tempting, I don’t like the idea of working in the same place as my dad. It’s a huge red flag already that I should just turn it down.

While I did sent my resume, my dad came back from work later that day saying I should send in another one because the text was “too small to read”. They said they want my resume to be a size 12 so it would “big enough” for them to read it.

Well, color me flabbergasted.

In the 5 years that I have been sending and updating my resumes, never have I heard of an HRD returning an applicant’s resume complaining that the text was too small to read. As far as I know, a bigger font does not make a resume or even a curriculum vitae any more impressive other than making it too cluttered. The resume that was sent back to me were riddled with notes about tips on how to make it readable. Can this HRD be any more full of bullcrap?

I decided to send in a CV this time, much cleaner in look, shorter on words yet still filled with enough content for anyone from any HRD to read without any hassle (I even emailed my dad with a portable document file containing one with a bigger font). Unfortunately, my dad called, yelling me “Why is it different? They didn’t like it! Why is it too small! It needs more words!!”. The last one’s an exaggeration but basically my dad doesn’t care if my CV stretches ten pages long, which is just absurd at this point.

I just don’t know with this people. How do they keep on getting applicants if they keep on refusing them because of resumes considered unacceptable to them? Isn’t that ethically wrong for any HR department? Shouldn’t the point behind a resume/CV all about presenting our qualifications and credentials? Why would they care so much about what those documents look like face-value and not what’s written on them?

In my case, the resumes I have produced and sent have been anything but unreadable. Some of them are based on templates I’ve found online and from Microsoft Word itself. No one from all the places I’ve applied to ever turned me away because of a resume that was deemed “unreadable”. No one from the places I’ve applied to ever complained about its format, its readability, nor presentability.

Because of this, I know for sure that this is one workplace I’m not gonna be a part of, ever. No amount of pushing from my dad will change my mind about it, especially now that I’m now employed (just not in the same workplace as him).

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