I’ve been doing a lot of interviewing lately and I can’t fathom how easy it would be for me to walk out of the room begging HR to hire people on the spot. It has happened before.

Lately I have been leaving the room many times with a “they were alright” attitude. Every once in a while, the magical, rainbow farting unicorn will show up and blow me away. Be that unicorn.

I am sick of seeing just OK candidates and want something more. This is how you’ll impress me.

Proof read your resume.
Really? It’s the year 20-flipping-15 and I find spelling errors on 30% of people’s resumes.

What. Is. Up. With. That.

OK, the issues are mainly with grammar and design. However, you should still have a buddy or girlfriend or your boyfriend’s roommate or your mom (or all of them) read it over and look to see if you spelled your high school name right with the correct capitalization. Also be specific. If you have URL’s to things you worked on, put them in there somewhere. You made a word press plugin. PUT IT ON THERE.

Oh, and I don’t care about your AP high school credits in 9th grade.

Really.

Know the 3 questions I’m going to ask you and have a good answer for each of them.

1. Tell me about yourself
   Give me a good overview of your personality, what you have going for you and why I should choose you. This is the first thing I ask while I’m double checking your resume. Sadly, I know by the time you shook my hand if I like you or not. Change my mind, I’m open to it. It happens more often than people think.
2. What have you built?
   I want to know anything you have worked on. Programming, bird houses, bands, it doesn’t matter. One person I admired the tenacity most from high school started a lawn mowing business. Even though I interview programmers, I would love that story.
3. Name a hardship.
   I want to know about that jerk that blamed you for his printer not working. How did you handle it? Did you run out of red paint while painting a barn? Did you lose 80 pounds because you just wanted to kick a bunch of ass? I deal with problems every day that would make good stories. If you have never had a hardship, you are not trying hard enough. See question #2.

Build something
This is the biggest thing out there. Give me a URL to a personal website that has your resume listed on it made on word press, I may do jumping jacks. If I can download an app on my phone that has a picture of you with a thumbs up that I can click to make cat noises. I will tell EVERYONE in HR to hire you plus I will buy you a beer. If it’s an internal class project, print out some screenshots. I don’t care if it’s ugly or not up to par with newfacebookclone.com, I will be ecstatic.

It really doesn’t take much to make you better than 95% of the people out there. If you do these things, we literally fight for you in our company.