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".

A friend of mine in biomedical research advertised for a research assistant. The covering letter for one keen male applicant said "I attach my testicles". We assume that he meant to type "testimonials", misspelled it and it was autocorrected to "testicles". He didn't get the job.

I was using the term as in normal behaviour for the time or a particular part of society.

I had never been asked the same question for any other job I applied for at that time or since so, no, I didn't consider it culturally normal.

I was often asked, during interviews, at that time, if I was about to get married and if so, if I was planning on having children. That was later ruled out as not allowable but wasn't in the 70s and I would have considered it normal at the time even if it really annoyed me.

I tempted in HR for a hospitality place years ago and every morning I had to open and sort all the CVs that had been sent in.

The standout one had the text printed on a background of a black and white professional photo of the candidate posing in gym gear to show off his muscles 😂

Unfortunately, despite their commendable language list, they didn't actually speak the local language so were useless to advice local clients in local legal compliance!

I speak Swiss German as an additional language, so have some sympathy with your list of dead languages. I only include it if I think the organisation might appreciate useless but hard to obtain skills.

My favourite NHS application was one that was pretty much blank and said" if you want to know more about me just call me on my mobile"

Hahaha, did he get admitted?

Here are some howlers from people applying for an English editor job

Finish Embassy
I want to be apart of the team
bachelor often spelled Batchelor
Englisch spelled the German way

I also got a whole CV written in French when the application said please submit your CV in English

I am sure some more will come back to me. They were rejected if they had typos because then they couldn’t do the job.

I tell my son (just finished Maths at uni 😱) to put his first job on his CV, to make recruiters chuckle, but he won’t listen. His first job was working hard as an Oompa-Loompa.

I remembered another one. We had a temp covering a maternity leave and she applied for a job in our team and in the CV she submitted to our team: she claimed she headed a project and completed it in so many months and it had increased productivity in the team.
I was in charge of that project and it had not been completed at the time of her CV 4 years ago - it got pulled and is still not finished.
I am still fixing her mistakes.

An applicant for a teaching assistant post at the Catholic Primary school I worked at said that, although she wasn’t Catholic herself, she had had a great aunt who was a nun and enclosed a photograph of said nun as proof. There was no requirement for the post holder to be Catholic.

This is priceless.

In "Personal Qualities" someone wrote "I have an addictive personality but have managed to give up everything I was addicted to (apart from alcohol)."

School friend on their university application

Health: Mustn’t grumble

Depending when it was, that may not have been particularly out there by web designer application standards. I remember our office advertising for one back when websites were still pretty new, so graduates from all sorts of art and design backgrounds applied. Applications tended towards the creative. One CV was on a jigsaw, and one came in the form of a build-your-own-glider kit (executive toy sized, not full sized; that would definitely have earned.an interview).

Bene facis! I was totally guessing!

Well at least that showed it probably wasn't written by AI!

Just curious - why is Swiss German useless? I understand that in some jobs there will be no need at all to speak any languages other than the main one spoken within the company, but why is Swiss German particularly useless?

Came in at ten to one!

had listed both their strengths and weaknesses. I don't remember what the strengths were, but under weaknesses was: too good looking. There was a poolside photo, in bikini, attached.

Job ad was for legal assistant.

It's a spoken-only language used by a relatively small number of people, which is (unfairly) ridiculed by German Germans for sounding silly. Me putting it on my CV would be the equivalent of a French person putting Scots down when applying for a job in Spain. An academic curiosity, but completely useless in the context.

(Yes, before you jump on me, I know Scots does have a written form, but it's not exactly business standard...)

Not a CV, but a very painful interview for an apprentice, we had a young lad who was very difficult to get much out of and my colleague went off piste from the agreed interview questions and asked about his hobbies.

He said “I like guns”, then with more prompting, revealed that it was his brother who liked guns and went to a shooting club, but himself he was afraid of loud noises so just watched his brother doing it on a video.

When prompted with do you have any other hobbies, he said he was “learning to play the piano”, then with more prompting said that he didn’t actually have a piano but had watched other people playing on YouTube.

At the end, we asked if he had any question for us, and he asked “would I have to get the bus everyday?”, and it had to be explained to him that if he got the job, it would be his responsibility to work out his commute arrangements.

He didn’t get the job.

@NeedToKnow101 ”my friend” would like to know how/where one gets a job as an Oompa Loompa?

Covering letter was a hand written note - biro, on a single page of one of the envelope length notepads - saying ‘I would very much like this job because I am a hard worker and a great people person’

CV - a picture of him with Terry Wogan. With the date and place on the back.

And a stamped addressed envelope to return the picture of him and Tel.

I found out he sent this letter to hundreds of companies advertising jobs if they had an office in the West End as he was a stage door stalker.

I worked in a bar as a student, and we got a cover letter that was two pages long that detailed how he’d been sacked from his last bar job for spitting at a customer, but gave great description of what lead up to it and how he wasn’t at fault.

Not a cv, but a CPD record for a Charterrship application in an engineering field - about 40% of the required hours were put down the watching C5 “The World’s Biggest Bridges” type programmes. Light entertainment, not really professional development for a chartered engineer.