While wandering through forums and nerdy corners of the internet, we stumbled upon some unconventional IT resumes. Some of these resumes seem to serve as outlets for self-expression, while others are bold attempts to catch the recruiter’s attention — despite their unconventional nature, both types are genuine efforts to land a job. Then there are the satirical critiques of the hiring system, cleverly disguised as CVs.
Here are the strangest — and most entertaining — resumes we found. Which of them would you invite for an interview?
A brilliant pony
Inspired by My Little Pony, the resume below was created years ago by Joseph Redmon, the creator of the popular object detection algorithm YOLO (You Only Look Once). It’s still available on his website.
Is this a resume or a restaurant menu? 🍚
One developer described himself as a bowl of white rice: versatile, adaptable, and ready to become anything. He provided examples: lemon rice as a metaphor for Java development and ghee rice for mobile development, among others.
According to the hiring manager who shared the story on Quora, the resume got the developer an interview, but not the job.
Facebook style
A developer shared the resume below on Quora. He designed it in 2010 when applying for an SDE role at Facebook. “I was thinking of doing something different and got a bit carried away,” he explained. He added a “Why?” section on the CV stating, “Love Creativity; Think so does Facebook.” Despite his creativity in recreating a Facebook profile page, he didn’t get an interview.
Meet the unicorn dev 🦄
The resume below was shared on Reddit by its creator, who says that, after experiencing an “anger meltdown” with interviews that led nowhere, he decided to create a parody CV just to spam apply to companies and waste their time. Surprisingly, he received genuine responses, he says, with recruiters inviting him for interviews and some even describing him as “a terrific profile.”
According to him, some of the companies that responded to the parody had previously rejected his real CV, stating they chose candidates whose profiles aligned more closely with the role.
Rickroller
A developer with excellent copywriting skills conducted an experiment in which she created and shared the prank CV below. She claims to have received interview invitations from several major companies — she even shared the screenshots of the email exchanges with those companies on Reddit. On top of all the outrageous nonsense (“Spread Herpes to 60% of the intern team”), all the links she included in the resume itself and email communication with HR were rickrolls. Nevertheless, the alleged experience at FAANG companies appeared to be the key factor in receiving those interview invitations.
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