If You Really Had All That Power, Why Would You Use It For Retail?

I am the hiring manager for our big box retail store. We’ve gotten a lot of interesting characters, and during this time of crisis, I haven’t been overly picky.

Then, one day, I got this resume. Well… “resume” is only used in the loosest definition of the word. It was an email with “[Candidate]’s resume” in the subject and then just a link in the body.

Okay… Odd, but not something that kills your chances. Some of the more verbose applicants at least say something about the resume being available on this or that job hunting site and provide a link to that. While I consider this a tiny bit lazy, I HAVE found a few diamonds this way.

I clicked on the link. Until my dying day, I will laugh every time I remember it. I actually did burst out laughing uncontrollably. I laughed so hard and so long that some of my employees and a few fellow managers came to investigate.

The link had brought us to THE most pretentious website about the candidate. The website was crammed to the gills with bullet points about his “achievements.”

One said, “I went to [War-Torn And Extremely Dangerous Country] and single-handedly transformed the local government to serve the people.”

Another claimed he had “arm-wrestled a [Notorious Biker Gang] leader and won.”

There were obviously-staged photographs of him shaking hands with various people of color and smiling. The captions under these explained how they claimed that the handshake had transformed their lives.

His one and only reference was supposedly some kind of general of a nation who would worship the ground the applicant walked upon; all we had to do was call and mention his name!

Every sentence was self-serving, self-congratulatory, and painfully obviously a complete and utter lie. I half-expected him to tout himself as the one who threw an evil ring into a volcano or personally splashed water on a green witch’s face and melted her.

But the pièce de résistance? A video of him strategically slouched in an ornate almost-a-throne chair, surrounded by fawning girls while talking about how awesome he was.

It was so bad that it became an infamous story about the worst — but funniest — resume ever submitted.

It turned out, though, that we had an intern who had been a classmate of this candidate’s. When the story reached the intern, they came to talk to me.

Intern: “Yeah. He made up a lot of unbelievable stories in class. One time, he claimed to have gotten in a street fight where he did some Jet Li fighting after getting stabbed in the stomach with a bowie knife. Funny thing is, he doesn’t have any scars to prove it, and he refuses to explain why or admit that he’s full of it.”

Obviously, I never called the applicant back for an interview because the job had nothing to do with writing fantasy stories.