I emailed the candidate and thanked him for applying. I asked him to please resubmit a resume and cover letter which covered all major employment during the time frame covered in his resume (thus filling in the missing jobs with the experience he claimed in his questionnaire), and to please provide me a new cover letter that discussed his experience in our industry. I suggested he have someone proof read same prior to submitting. IF the hiring manager was interested, I would then give him the background — so that the candidate got a chance to make a better first impression, but the hiring manager also had all the info.

I THINK i was exceptionally polite — i’m usually commended for courtesy — and his first partial response was to thank me for the constructive criticism. then he proceeded to lecture me on hw to be a ‘good hiring manager’ and then commented about wasting his time and finally called me rude.

If I were searching for a job (he’s not working), I would like to think i’d be thrilled that someone was giving me some input AND even more so that someone was giving me a 2nd chance to make that first impression with the hiring manager. wouldn’t you? I was pretty irritated — i’d wasted my time offering him feedback and doing something i’d never done before, asking for a resume that actually fits our listed requirements, and the thanks I got was what my teenager would call a ‘snotgram’.

I also love when people write that their title is ‘manger’ as opposed to ‘manager’.

Once, upon calling an online applicant in for an interview, he told me that he really liked to figure things out piece by piece, through trial and error, “ya know, through ‘seductive’ reasoning”. Genius!