Resume in the form of a custom Lego figure

Best of luck to her. I always wonder when I see these novelty resumes whether they work or not. Guess you only need it to work once.

3 Likes

Please hire her. She gets a job, and the HR person gets a bunch of Legos. Everybody wins!

2 Likes

I once put together a GBA game to try to get attention from anyone in the games industry. It was not a rousing success. Then I got hired by EA, maybe a year later, on the strength of a good job interview and they happened to be hiring a lot of people at the time.

I don’t know how much this generalizes to other industries, but my experience with job hunting reminds me of the Sex and the City taxi theory - employers are like taxis, and if you happen to find one with the light on, then you’re in. Getting hired has so little to do with how good you are, and so much to do with whether they happen to be looking for someone with basically your skillset while you are also looking for work.

Which completely blows when you get laid off and you need a job right freaking now because there’s only so long that your family of five can reasonably live with your wife’s parents

1 Like

What is in the background? What is that thing to the left of the figure? A window? I just seems like a half-assed, confusing, slapped on element on an otherwise interesting piece.

2 Likes

Haha - I’m glad someone mentioned that. It’s clearly something, right, but I haven’t the foggiest just what. Is there a face in there?

1 Like

The first level HR guy was like “What is this? His resume is corrupted with a bunch of random characters, into the bin it goes.”

1 Like

I was going through the job hunt game last summer and I learned that these days most resumes do not make it through the auto-screen software. That’s why I wonder about these novelty resumes - they assume a person reads them, which seems to be pretty rare.

From what I can tell from a basic knowledge of search engine technology, the tech in these HR tools is a big pile of suck. But the HR people have no idea that their tool is basically arbitrary and does not generate the best resumes for the job they need to fill. What they do know is that the search engine takes a big unmanageable electronic glob of resumes and spits out a small, manageable number, which appear to be more or less relevant to the job they advertised.

It’s frustrating for job seekers because with no rhyme or reason to the screening software, there is no way to know if anyone ever sees your resume.

I have better than average skill at formatting things for business use and used to rely on my slick looking resume to get me in the door, but last summer I used a text resume with very little formatting to feed to the very dumb machines. Then I had a nicer one on my website and linked in that a hiring machine could download and print.

3 Likes

I suspect when these sorts of resumes really do work is when it is hard to differentiate yourself. Someone I knew was once trying to hire someone for general office work. They got in excess of 60 resumes. All of them seemed to have the basic skill set they needed. Yet there was no way they could offer them all an interview. So they tossed resumes for any reason (“This person says they like fishing, I hate fishing, toss”). I suspect a lego resume would have moved you to the top of that pile.

1 Like

My housemate/landlord a few years back made a resume in the style of a breakfast cereal box, complete with a huge star with his own overly-ecstatic-looking face in the middle. He then printed it onto a breakfast cereal box. I don’t know whether that’s what got him the job (not a creative one per se – network operations), but his boss still keeps the box/resume* on a shelf in the office.

*boxsume? resubox? ceriaculum vitae?

2 Likes

In my experience, there’s a collective sigh that emanates from design studios around July when the ‘creative’ CVs start to come in. Many of them are unreadable, poorly organised and labour-intensive.

Leah’s at least looks professionally done, but if she doesn’t get the dream job, then she’s set herself up for a lot of work producing customised, multi-page, colour résumés for her job-hunting mailshots. In this austere, budget-conscious age, that doesn’t necessarily recommend her.

1 Like

I only hire people whose resumes are all Helvetica.

1 Like

How utterly depressing that people have to go to such lengths just to get an unpaid internship. We should be asking what the fuck is wrong with the job market rather than applauding her.

5 Likes

Can we do both?

4 Likes

Portal. She’s Chell in corporate drag.

Yeah sorry, you’re right. It is utterly amazing. I just think it’s sad that this is apparently what’s necessary to land a job these days.

1 Like

Unfortunately for Leah, Megan was willing to work for half the money. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I feel like many HR folks do understand that the tools aren’t great, but a lot of times the overwhelming amount of resumes (at a large company, for instance) can be mindboggling to deal with, so it ends up being the only real strategy to handle them. At least, that’s what I’ve heard from every HR person I’ve asked about it.

1 Like

Yeah but then employers found out Megan didn’t work nearly as well as Leah, often times not sticking together with other employees as well.

4 Likes

On a more serious note, I know lego makes a superior brick, i’m a lifelong fan.

But damn…as an adult most of the kits I have my eyes on are in the $200.00 - $400.00 range. that is per kit!!! I’m sad when I buy a $20.00 - $40.00 kit for my daughter and open the box and see how few bricks you get for that price, at cost it can’t be more then a few dollars worth of plastic bricks.

We just saw the lego movie, and the first thing I thought when you see the basement was “damn, that must be like $400,000 worth of lego”. the fact that was my first thought really brought home to me how sad i am that lego pricing makes it out of reach of so many children, and how you have to invest a small fortune to get the trunk full of lego that I had growing up.

(and don’t even get me started about the “kits” that only consist of blocks so specialized that you could never build anything else with them. lol.)

2 Likes

Necessarily necessary but not necessarily sufficient, unhappily, unnecessary to add.