This week I had an occasion to sift through the resumes that were received in response to one of the vacancies put out by my department.

As the position was for someone with a 1-3 year experience, almost all the resumes had a line for "hobbies and interests". After a first few resumes I could almost recite verbatim what I would find in that column for the next bunch of resumes - reading, listening to music, net surfing (how can this be a hobby? And if my company employs such a person, should we disable his internet access?) and Computer Games. 1-2 people had mentioned cricket and badminton but that was more an exception than a rule.

I am sure the phrases like "good growth potential", "wide exposure to the latest Software Technologies", "achieving targets successfully", "career advancement" and "visionary team" will be around at least till the end of this century (if the world survives for that long!)

There was a resume with Linux flavors that sounded straight out of some sci-fi movie - Debian, Suse and Ubuntu (I am almost certain there is African Cricketer with a similar name!). Poor me is familiar with only Redhat! This resume gave me a huge complex that lasted for half a day :-)

And finally, one of the resumes said that the person is a "Certified Ethical Hacker". I wondered for a moment and then decided that I don't want any hacker, Ethical or otherwise, to be within a 100 mile radius of my company. The lines between what is ethical and what is not are rather blurred these days, won't you agree? :-)