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I posted an ad on Monster a couple of days ago. Yet again, I am astounded by the number of people who applied but obviously didn't read the ad. Basically the ad was for an entry level graphic designer. In the past when we've posted on Monster we've gotten flooded with resumes. As a result I've developed my own quick "triage" system for narrowing down the number of resumes I actually have to read:

1. Language - Even though the ad was written in English, about half the reponses came in French. On one hand I can understand this, because we are located in Montreal (a mostly bilingual city). On the other hand, if I wanted responses in French I would have
posted the ad in French.

2. Location - The ad stated that we were only accepting applications from people in the Montreal area. That didn't stop people from New Hampshire, Alberta, England, Australia and Morocco from applying. The ad made it clear that it was an entry level position. Its not the sort of job that we're going to fly someone across the Atlantic for an interview and then sponsor them to immigrate to Canada.

3. Relevance - Several applicants seem to have missed the whole "graphic designer" part of the ad. I've gotten several resumes from systems administrators, electrical engineers, and software engineers. They applied even though their resumes showed no graphics experience or skills at all. There was one programmer, who was obviously a programmer, except in his cover letter he seemed to have replaced every instance of the word "programmer' with "Graphic Desginer" (spelled that way). I also got one resume from an interior designer with 20 years of photoshop experience. Maybe he thought the ad was looking for
people who had worked in those 1-hour photo developing places.

So basically anyone who responded to the ad in English, from the Montreal area, who has even vague graphic design skills made the first cut. We'll actually spend some time on the remaining resumes and really look at their work. In an ideal world we'd have time to evaulate every resume that came our way, in practicle terms, when a resume comes in we're looking for any excuse to trash it.

I'm not even going to go into the websites of some of these "designers": overdesigned, cryptic (what do you mean the only way to change pages is to click on tiny tan unlabed squares), or just broken.