I'm in the process of hiring a new employee and I thought I'd share some observations on the resumes I'm getting, in the hopes that it may help some people.

Everything I'm going to say should be taken with a grain of salt, not every company is looking for the same types of people/have the same criteria by which you will be judged.

I put the ad up on Tuesday afternoon, so far I've received 215 resumes, this is for a $14/hour entry level office assistant.

44 of those went straight into the garbage

7 resumes were sent from international sources, UAE, China, India, Vietnam, an interesting thing about these resumes, every single one of them included a picture of their face on the resume, not a single other local resume had a picture, I'm not sure how I feel about it.

25 of the other resumes were again people that were too far away, sure they were in my country, but saying that you are willing to drive 2 hours a day for a $14/hour job is unrealistic.

The other 12 that were trashed had egregious spelling errors, I even received one that was a typed resume partially edited by pen and scanned...

Of the rest, there are about 20 resumes that are worth looking into; how did I pare down 170 to 20? I'm wondering what you may think of this but the majority of these resumes had no experience, and I advertised it as such and that isn't an issue, but the majority of these resumes where from people aged 18-25 and not a single one of them stuck with a job for more than a year, I'm seeing people that graduated in 2009 that have had 5-7 jobs in the last 4 years, that's crazy, do you know how bad that looks on a resume, I'm looking for people that will stick around, I know people don't do the 35 years at the same job thing anymore, but you should be aiming at 3-5 years in my opinion unless your dream job suddenly presents itself.

Those 20 that I'm digging into now have all been able to keep a job for more than 3 years and that's as far into it I've gone.

Other observations

-More than half of the resumes were from university graduates and almost all of them had some post secondary education.

-I had the resumes sent to a gmail account, if you have a google+ page, you may want to look into what's on it because it adds a picture of you to your email, there was one girl that I ended up excluding because she looked like a stripper.

-There are about 50 resumes that I haven't been able to open, I didn't get rid of them yet, but you should be doing everything you can't to make it easier on whoever may be looking at your resume, PDF or Word, they are the standard, don't send a RTF file

-References available on request? many people just include this on the resume, I'm not sure why you'd hide it away.

-One guy did his resume in comic sans...

-People that went to schools I attended or were from a neighbourhood I lived in I spent more time looking at, I'm not sure that that moved anyone from the no to yes pile, but you should put that info on your resume, many people didn't.