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As many of you are aware by now, I am a restaurant manager. In my position I do a lot of application sifting, interviewing, and other such hiring activities. August is our biggest hiring time of the year. We lose a lot of employees who either move away to college or local students cut back their hours. This means August is a very busy month for interviewing and hiring. It's also a big month for headaches for me because of the overwhelming amount of stupidity I'm subjected to by people who actually think I'm going to be impressed with their idiocy. It's amazing, really. People think just because it's a restaurant any yahoo can walk in and get a job. Not true, but people still seem to think so. We get about 2-3 applications a day, more if we have "Now Hiring" signs up, and at least 95% of the applications I get are from people I wouldn't hire for someone else's store. It's bad enough when people are so clueless that they can't present themselves professionally in a job interview, like the guys who come in for interviews wearing a wife beater and a visor turned upside-down and backwards, or the guy who told me he changes jobs every two months. But what really gets me is the people who can't even manage to do something as simple as filling out a job application. At any given time, we have a stack of applications half a foot thick. With that many people wanting jobs, your application is your chance to impress me enough to call you and set up a job interview. Some of the applications I get make me shake my head. Spelling and grammar errors, words crossed out, whiteout, scribbles, doodles, and questions left blank make me really wonder just what the hell these people were thinking when they handed me that application.

The following are all actual application responses from actual people trying to get me to give them a job. The information in black is questions from our application, the red is the applicant's response, and the green is my take on it. Enjoy. And know that these people who are too dumb to get into an actual restaurant (you know, with servers and bills left at your table) are probably working at the Taco Bell you just ate at. Fun huh?

 

Part One - General Data

In this section, people fill out such basic information as their anticipated start date, availability, and type of work and hours they're looking for. Sounds simple enough, but apparently not to some, like the guy who wrote down his availablity, but had apparently forgotten his poker night or something because he scratched it all out and wrote in a completely different one. And like these people:

Position Applied For: "Hostest" (This wasn't a typo, she spelled it "Hostest" in three different places on her application. Call me a dick, but if you can't even spell the job you want, you're not getting it.)

Position Applied For: "Cook and Kitchen" (Apparently they're two different jobs.)

Availability: "I'm available mostly any time of the time." (I got nothing.)

Availability: "I have my own transportation and my schedule is completely open, please hire" (Nice touch there, but if they were so desperate to find a job, I wonder why they'd quit three of them in a year?)

Availability: "I like morning/day shifts :)" (The smiley face was right-side-up on the application, but you get the picture. And sorry, but a smiley face on an application is an automatic no. I don't want to be around smiley-face-drawing ass clowns.

 

Part Two - Personal Data

In this section, people fill out slightly more difficult information such as their name, address, phone number, and employment eligibility information.:

Have you been convicted of a felony in the last 5 years: "Please ask me in person." (Um, no thanks.)

 

Part Three - Education Data

In this section, we ask for educational information including high school/colleges attended, courses of study, and whether or not people graduated. Some interesting responses here, such as the guy who listed the same school twice and on one line circled that he had graduated and on another circled that he hadn't graduated from the same school he already said he graduated from. And the people who apparently never even made it to high school who leave this section blank. And then there was this guy:

College Attended: "I don't know" (Apparently he did a lot of drugs in college.)

 

Part Four - Employment Data

Now here's where the men seperate themselves from the boys. Like the people who leave the entire section blank (excluding 16-year olds who may have actually never had a job before) or the people who leave gaps of a year or more in employment or don't include employment dates, apparently thinking I'm stupid and won't notice something fishy like that. And like these people:

Position Held: "Self Employed" (They offered no more information than this. No business name, no work description, nothing. Apparently they were peddling crack or prostitutes and didn't want me to know.)

Reason For Leaving: "Got new job" (One of the plethora of "No shit" responses I see on job applications. I also get a lot of "Quits" in this section.)

Reason For Leaving: "Seeking new opportunity" (This is one of those nice-sounding euphamisms people like to put down rather than saying they got fired. The funny thing is this is usually the response from when people quit Dairy Queen to work at Kentucky Fried Chicken.)

Reason For Leaving: "Personal" (This was his response for every job he listed. Apparently it's none of my business as a potential employer why he's leaving his jobs. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's because he has a habit of getting himself fired and doesn't want me to know.)

Position Held: "Assistant Manger" (Like what Jesus was born in?)

Major Duties: "Stocking and restocking" (See, this chick actually set herself apart from the other "model" at Abercombie & Fitch who applied the same day. Both "models" listed taking cash, assisting customers, cleaning, and stocking shelves as their major duties. But this "model" had the foresight to tell me that she could also RE-stock those very same shelves. Very impressive.)

Reason For Leaving: "Monetary Dispute" (This from a grocery store cashier. I've never dropped an application so fast in my life.)

Reason For Leaving: "Found a new job with better pay" (This is usually a very good reason for leaving a job and doesn't set off any warning bells, but in this situation the girl had been a server at Bob Evans and got a new job with better pay as........a bagger at Meijer. Color me suspicious.)

List Major Duties: "Working-n-public" (Is that supposed to mean IN public? Because usually people use the cutesy -n- thing to mean AND, so were they trying to say working AND public? Either way it didn't make a whole lot of sense in the context of a Wal-Mart stocker.)

Reason For Leaving: "Terminated without reason at end of probationary period." (There's so many things wrong with this I don't know where to start. And by the way, she was terimated without reason from her job as a bagger at Kroger.)

Reason For Leaving: "Was hard to get enough hours and keep up in school" (I had to re-read this one a few times because I wasn't sure what they were trying to say. The first part said they didn't get enough hours, and the second part implies that they were working too many hours. Was she looking for a job that let you do schoolwork on the clock? Or a job that paid you for hours when you weren't actually there? How do you want more hours at work and more time for school at the same time? It boggles my mind.)

Reason For Leaving: "Hours Cut" (Mind you, this was at Burger King. If you get your hours cut at fucking Burger King, you've got problems.)

Reason For Leaving: "Hours Cut" (This was even better because this person was a manager at Taco Bell and had their hours cut. The single laziest person I've ever worked with quit that job because they made him work too hard and he got a job as a manager at that same Taco Bell. So that means the guy who filled out this application was even worse than the laziest mother fucker I have ever worked with in my life. My head hurts trying to comprehend that.)

Position Held: "Salesperson." (This would be all well and good if the major duty section hadn't said "serving food, cooking, cleaning." I don't give a fuck what flowery euphamism you want to use to describe your job. Just tell me what your fucking job was. Naturally I didn't hire this person, but I'm guessing she's referring to herself as a "free agent" rather than "unemployed."

 

For more actual application responses:

and you want me to give you a job?

and you want me to give you a job? (Part 3)

and you want me to give you a job? (Part 4)

and you want me to give you a job? (Part 5)