How to blow a job application in five easy steps

The other day, CNN posted a neat article about ten of the most audacious fibs told on resumes. In an increasingly competitive jobworld, putting one's best foot forward on a resume or in an interview is the only smart thing to do, but for some people the best foot forward turns out to be the foot that landed in dog poop.

I've been interviewing for a new junior hire over the past couple of weeks. While I haven't hit any fibs quite as outrageous as the ones collected by CNN, I've seen some interesting behavior over the past couple of weeks. For your consideration, here are a few really good ways to blow your chances of getting hired:

1. Put everything on the resume except what matters
One candidate sent in a nine-page document that recorded just about everything except for the number of times he or she goes to the bathroom in a day. That would be great, except that it's all buzzwords and no substance. Meanwhile, in this expansive document, all the important stuff was missing. Case in point:

Exceeded management expectations
How?

Single-handedly turned a negative perception of [business unit name] around
Great! What did you do?

I declined to interview this one.

2. Go over my head
I read one unimpressive internal resume and declined to interview the candidate. Next thing I knew, a very senior executive was banging down the door demanding to know why.

If a very senior executive is trying to offload someone on his own team, what does that tell you about the candidate?

The bossman and I interviewed the candidate together, largely so we could back each other up if crap started raining from the skies.

The interview was interesting. It confirmed my original expectations and then some. Afterwards, the bossman looked at me and said Well, that was a fucking waste of an hour.

Thanks to this person's effort to override my initial decision, now our entire division knows not to touch this one with a ten-foot pole.

3. Lie
If you're going to lie outright, don't make it something an employer can check on by walking twenty feet down the hall. There are benefits to leaving an organization and then coming back but if you lie like this rebound candidate did, you're playing a dangerous game.

I asked around after interviewing the candidate and then marked this one as a no hire, no referral. This candidate was an outrageous slimebag.

4. Betray common sense
This one was a candidate in the last stages of acheiving permanent residency. The candidate declared his or her reason for leaving the current employer as too much time traveling for business.

That's a fair enough reason, but who voluntarily leaves an employer a couple of months before achieving permanent residency? A more likely explanation was that this person was laid off or fired.

I declined to interview this one. That's too bad; the credentials were actually quite good.

5. Unleash your anger issues
Finally, here's one dating back a few years: if you get a job offer and it's not to your liking by a magnitude of less than five percent, you probably don't want to blow up and scream at the unlucky person conveying the news: you might find that your offer gets retracted very quickly. If you start stalking both the person with the bad judgment to make the initial offer as well as the unlucky person who conveyed the offer to find out why your offer was retracted, you might find your description in the hands of the local police and a cease and desist letter in your mailbox.

I wish I was making this up, but I'm not.

Any other bad candidate/bad employer job-hunting stories out there?