What's the oddest thing you've seen listed on a CV?

[FelicityShagsWell]

What's the weirdest thing you've seen on a CV? I received one in application for a job and they had put a hobbies section in which they'd listed "smoking".

The most memorable one I've seen was someone who listed one of their hobbies as 'member of the Cloud Appreciation Society'. That was a genuinely interesting rabbit hole to go down!

You probably shouldn't be making recruitment choices if you're not informed about common language surrounding disability and not curious enough to enquire. Such language was not available when I was in the job market, so I never was able to explain the discrepancy between others' perceptions of me and my high ability.

How sad to see the language we have to understand and explain ourselves is either mocked or simply used as another reason to exclude us.

Very arrogant to assume that someone in an interview (ie real life) wants to hear about the made up sky fairy nonsense. Urgh.

Again, showing your complete ignorance of what proper travelling is. I can assure you it’s the opposite of lazy. You sound very small minded and quite jealous.

.

I was just thinking that travelling has meant so many different things over my life, none of them include "chillaxing by a pool"! Now with kids proper travelling is a bit of a military operation and I use my 20y+ events role knowledge extensively!
Some people don't want to learn about history, languages, culture or try new food though.

One woman put amongst her many hobbies

''I have a large collection of porcelain dolls and like to do kinky things with them''.

I advertised for a part time shop assistant and one young man listed one of his hobbies as ‘vigilante’

I would've had to bring her in for an interview just to find out more about that!

I heard about the Cloud Appreciation Society on The Infinite Monkey Cage and would have invited someone who had it on their CV to an interview purely so that I could ask them about it!

A family photo with wife and kids

Q - how’s the current reputation of the Cloud Appreciation Society?

A - it’s looking up.

Sorry. 😉😂

@Squirrel60
@ThisSillyPoet

Wondering if either of these people got interviews?

Well you wouldn't need to worry about shoplifting.

hobbies - puffin watching (made sense when I learned she was from the Outer Hebrides!)

”police record - virgin” the poor boy had Google translated from his native French, ‘vierge’! I mean, I knew French police could be pretty full on, but that seems a little invasive! 🤣

That CV would have gone straight in the bin. It is arrogant and insular along with inappropriate.

It sounds like he's an evangelical Christian who considers it his duty to attempt to convert everyone he meets.

I was one of those people once, I crossed all sorts of inappropriate lines in my clumsy attempts to shoehorn Jesus into every conversation. The compulsion to do it, when you believe you're rescuing people from Hell, is very strong.

I'm now an atheist, and I cringe at my past behaviour in this regard. It's a really, really obnoxious and aggressive thing to do in any situation, but in the workplace it's staggeringly inappropriate and unprofessional.

Do you not have HR procedures and equality policies where you work? You are effectively talking of binning off a candidate due to their religious beliefs. Sure, someone going on a lengthy discourse on any topic is inappropriate on a CV but I think you need to be a bit wary when it comes to automatically barring a candidate due to something like this.

You can reject a job applicant for just about any reason you like. Far easier to do that than deal with the massive offence their inappropriate behaviour might cause in the workplace later.

Yes that why I would reject a CV on that basis alone rather than waste hours of HR resources sorting out inter -personal issues when they are employed

“Watching cartoons” - it was for a professional job which required a degree. It seemed a strange thing to put on a CV as an adult.

I also had ‘Sixer in Brownies’ which was also a bit of a stretch given it was well over 10 years since this position of responsibility had been obtained.

Photographs. They’re weird to put on a cv anyway, but some of them are entirely
non-work appropriate and I can’t fathom why people add them.

I guess it depends on where you work. In my public service organisation there was very strict guidance around recruitment, checklists, forms etc but even so I would have thought that non-discrimination on the basis of someone’s religion would form the basis of any firm’s recruitment policy (alongside sex, ethnicity etc) and that there was a legal framework around this.

It's not discrimination against someone's religion. It's being concerned about how they might behave in the workplace because they've inappropriately tried to witness on their CV. That's a legitimate reason to reject an application.

Whether you're religious or not is completely irrelevant to almost all jobs bar a tiny handful where it's a key requirement of the role. Your religion shouldn't be on your CV at all for anything else.

This was someone applying for a postgraduate degree place, FWIW.

But it wasn't necessarily to discriminate. It was just obvious that they hadn't bothered to understand what the application required. They didn't address what they were asked, because they were too busy banging on about something irrelevant.

If they'd chosen to spend two pages of A4 rhapsodising about their adoration for pecan pie it'd have been equally twatty.