Man Uses A Resume Filled With Nonsense & An Offensive Name To Apply For 100 Jobs And Gets 29 Calls For Interviews
Andrey_Popov | ShutterstockIf you've spent any time in the job market, you likely know what it's like to craft a detailed, glowing resume highlighting your myriad accomplishments and talents only to hear nothing but crickets in return.
In the age of AI, most resumes are scanned by applicant tracking systems before they're ever seen by a human, and some companies have given up on asking for resumes altogether. It's enough to make you wonder what the point of creating a top-notch resume is in the first place, and one job search consultant put the nail in the coffin by proving there pretty much isn't any point at all.
A man managed to land 29 job interviews using a nonsensical resume with an offensive name.
Jerry Lee is a job search expert and the co-founder of Wonsulting, a company that provides guidance and resources for job seekers on how to network, optimize their resumes, and ace interviews. After seeing a Redditor make wild claims that their absurd resume, which included stats like having spread an STI to 60% of their intern team, got a 90% callback rate, he decided to conduct his own experiment to see if the Redditor could possibly have been telling the truth.
Unfortunately, they probably were. Lee created a resume for a fake person named Kismma D. Nhuts. He shared a photo of it in a post on X, asking, "Would you give this person an interview?"
At first glance, it looked like a winning resume with sterling credentials from high-level jobs at Instagram, Google, and Amazon, with plenty of statistics showing Kismma D. Nhuts' impact. A closer look told an entirely different story, though.
Part of Mr. (or Ms! Who knows!) Nhuhts' job at Google, for example, was using "photos of my dog winning the World Cup" to improve the company's photo identification accuracy. At Amazon, Mr. or Ms. Nhuhts successfully raised "average coffee break time" by 300% by "nonstop crying in the main office room." And as for Kismma's skills? "Adult entertainment," "arson," and "Mia Khalifa" were among the things that got Lee 29 interviews, some of them with huge Fortune 500 companies.
Lee's experiment showed what recruiters actually focus on when reading resumes, as well as what we already know about how privilege affects the job search.
A more critical glance at Lee's resume, especially in the education section, gives some insight into how he was so successful despite his jobs, including working on projects like "Amazon Dating" that don't even exist.
@JerryJHLee | X
Namely, Kismma D. Nhuhts' degree from Stanford University, one of the most elite institutions in the world, and their job history composed almost entirely of so-called FAANG companies (the acronym for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google), the five most powerful tech companies in the world that tend to hire exclusively from elite circles.
Basically, it confirmed that the right fancy credentials will push you to the front of the line every time, no matter what your resume says. This was further proven by a 2025 study, which concluded that candidates who attended elite colleges and interned at Fortune 500 companies received better recruitment evaluations.
It also confirmed that even in the job search process, aesthetics might be the most important factor.
Recruiters usually spend about six to eight seconds reading a resume, which sounds harsh when you've put your heart and soul into crafting a nice one, but is almost (but not quite) understandable given how many applications they have to sift through.
Lee proved this through a previous experiment in which he used eye tracking software to get to the bottom of what recruiters look at in that wildly brief amount of time. They tend to focus on the most basic details and the top-most section, meaning for Mr. or Ms. Nhuhts, recruiters likely glanced at their stellar-looking most recent job at Instagram, and that was enough for them to miss the hilariously profane, silly, and nonsensical details in every other section of the resume.
www.kaboompics.com | Pexels
As Lee summarized in another X post, "as long as your resume looks like a good resume" with "clear job titles" and "80%+ of your bullet points … have numbers," recruiters will likely at least take you seriously and give you a glance.
Annoying, unfair, and cynical? Sure. But so is the entire job search process, start to finish. And, particularly for those who tend to create more verbose resumes (me, I'm talking about me), it's good to know that simplicity, numbers, and clarity are what really make the difference, even if one of your most finely honed skills is "arson."
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
