For a little change of pace, I’m going to give you a list today to aid you in your job hunt.

1. Don’t be late.
2. Don’t eat, drink or chew gum
3. Don’t discuss your divorce/ex/custody battle/gambling problem (past or present)/Relatives deaths or failed business ventures
4. Don’t ask to take a picture of your interviewer.
5. Don’t bring your lunch to the interview and eat it while you talk. (see #2)
6. Don’t nap in the building lobby.
7. Don’t nap in the interview.
8. Don’t talk about your extensive Star Wars action figure collection, or how you have them laid out in battle scenes, grouped by episode.
9. Don’t pass gas and try to blame it on the interviewer. Or a “rocky mountain barking spider”
10. Don’t ask where the bathroom is and say, “I need to drop the kids off at the pool, if you know what I mean”. Unfortunately, I do know what you mean, and it makes me want to scrub my brain with bleach to erase the mental image.

It is pretentious and annoying.

Unless you are famous enough to have an unauthorized biography written by a true-crime author, have the movie rights sold and narrated by James Earl Jones, you are not cool enough to pull this off. It is not quirky or gimmicky. And quirky, gimmicky things rarely work to get your resume noticed (in a positive way)unless you have some phenomenal experience to back it up.

While we’re on the subject of quirky ways to get your resume noticed, be very careful when selecting one of these methods. Some go over well, specifically in certain industries, and other go over like a lead balloon. If you are looking for a position in marketing or advertising, by all means, go all out. Think of it as a mini portfolio, include graphics and examples of your successful campaigns, its a great way to get your resume noticed when the average resume is looked at for about 2 minutes before a decision is made. If you are looking for a job in accounting, not so much. Nobody wants to see a spreadsheet of your household toilet paper budget with a pivot chart showing the rise in cost per square over the last 5 years.

Similarly, if you have a specially formatted resume, or one that includes graphics, always have a plain Word formatted copy for uploading to RTF websites. I will tell you from personal experience that uploading these resumes does not have a desirable end-result for the recruiter reading them, usually they come through so garbled that you can’t make heads nor tales of it. Also, more and more, hiring managers are viewing resumes on portable devices such as blackberrys, so a text only version could be read by your next boss while they are waiting for their next meeting, as opposed to when they get back in the office. They could be making a decision about hiring you, instead of wondering which graphics didn’t load in their email. They could be skipping over your resume to go on to the next candidate because yours took to long to load. By all means, bring your fancy resume to your interview with you, printed on nice paper, like you care about being hired.