I spent a couple of hours today going through resumes for a student intern position we're hiring for at Qualcomm. The position's actually pretty cool - whoever gets it will receive some valuable job experience working with games and graphics, and they'll be able to make quite a few industry contacts.

I was dismayed at how bad most of these resumes were. I'm not talking about poor grammer, or formatting, or anything else that they teach you in the typical resume writing class. And I'm not talking about lack of skills/experience, since these students were all from a prestigous engineering school. I'm mainly talking about irrelevance.

2/3 of the resumes failed to meet the minimum major requirements listed for the position. I don't mean that they were just missing some of them, they were missing ALL of them. No graphics, no gaming, no OpenGL, no exposure to embedded system. None of them even listed gaming as an area of interest. Seriously, I don't care how badly you want a job, if you're not even close to what a company says they're looking for, you're wasting everyone's time (including yours) by sending in a resume.

Some of these people even included generic-sounding cover letters stating that they are a perfect match for the job. [grin]

Many of them also listed their jobs at McDonalds or Walmart or whatever. I'm sure that some people out there care about the fact that you've at least held *a* job, but if you're applying for an engineering job, they probably don't. In general, don't bother listing information on your resume unless it helps establish you as being qualified for the job for which you're applying. You can get away with a bit - and listing things like hobbies and interests is fine - but keep it brief.

Finally, if there are multiple area in which you have skills/experiences and are willing to take a job in any of those areas, consider maintaing separate resumes, each focusing on a particular area.

Anyway, I hope that somebody finds this brief set of tips useful.