I don't know how I had a job.

As I am now job hunting, step one is getting my cover letter, references and resume in tip-top shape. The last job I had was a big-girl job, and I remember how pleased I was with the final version of my resume.

Oh, to be young and blindingly naive again.

Part of why I now know everything that is wrong with my resume is because I helped with several rounds of hiring at my last job. With all the atrocious resumes, cover letters, email correspondence leading up to interviews and the interviews themselves, I've got an arsenal of hire-me-NOW weaponry at my disposal.

And it's nice to know that we were much more stringent than most employers were.

Do you know how hard it is to find someone who has both a particular skill set and the ability to spell their own name correctly? Apparently the two are mutually exclusive.

It also helps that during my tenure at Resilience, I took the 12-week Word course through BCIT, as part of my technical writing program. That course was worth its weight in gold. If it had measurable weight. Just say it's worth its textbook's weight in gold.

Highlights from my 2007 resume

-Under Activities & Interests I put "new experiences." What a loser.

-There are upwards of one hundred different styles in the Styles & Formatting sidebar. ONE HUNDRED. Actually, in my continuing quest for journalistic integrity, and in my other quest to stop over-exaggerating everything all the time, I'm actually going to count.

Ok, so I was sort of right and sort of wrong. There are eighty-five different styles, but that is not including the standard ones that are already included with Word. It's well over a hundred if you include those.

Eighty-five.

Do you know how many is a good number to aim for?

Maybe ten or twelve.

So basically what this says is, "I'm telling you in words that I'm proficient with Word, but I'm proving this to be an outrageous lie as soon as you actually look at how I whipped this together. I'm also making it painfully obvious that my good friend Google helped me find a template on some website and that's what I based my resume off of."

Think of it this way: the words are the skin, and the styles are the skeleton.

And your employer has an x-ray machine.

You better hope your bones are in order.*

-I included an Objective.

Now I'm always torn on this one. I don't like the Objective section per se, but I also don't like jumping right into Skills or some other section. I feel like there needs to be some sort of "Hi I'm Sam and I want to work for you!" before I start telling you all the reasons I'm awesome. And I know that's what the cover letter is for, but you can't always assume that a potential employer is going to look at your cover letter first. We'll see what I come up with as I go.

Regardless, Objective is wrong wrong wrong.

-I underlined stuff. In blue. Wtf is wrong with me?

So it's clear I have some work ahead of me. And sadly, the more I read through this, the less I'd want to hire me. I thought I'd have some substance to work from, but apparently not.

*This, of course, is primarily for any position that includes writing. If you're a mechanic applying at Joe's Car Repair, they won't care if you used styles. They might not even care if you use Notepad.