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Recruitment & retention

Job applicant’s claims lead to Guru’s revelation

by Personnel Today 15 May 2007
by Personnel Today 15 May 2007

Similarities between Yours Truly and the Big I Am collided in a strange way when he received the following job application:

Hi Guru,

I thought you might like to mix things up a bit with some comedy CVs. My favourite so far features a picture of the candidate (thankfully a very attractive young lady) with a series of arrows pointing out of her face with the following phrases on them: ‘Beyond the mass’, ‘Hard working’, ‘Sophisticated’, ‘Open minded’, ‘Smart’, ‘Picky’, ‘Creative’, and ‘People person’.

If anyone knows what ‘beyond the mass’ means I would really appreciate it.

Disciple XXX.

First and foremost, Mass is an acronym for anonymous US state Massachusetts, which derives its name from the tribe of native Americans who lived in the ‘great blue hill region’.

Mere coincidence? Or should that be ‘great blue face region’?

Then there is the one you get in church, which is the really weird one, consisting as it does of turning wine into blood and bread into flesh. Noting the similarities between the Eucharist and the Night of the Living Dead, Guru drifted from his holier-than-thou perch and did some serious research.

It turns out that mass is the amount of matter and energy in a given object and was ‘discovered’ by Galileo Galilei when he demonstrated that objects with different masses fall at the same rate by dropping things from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

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Further investigations, however, reveal that it was really all about gravity and the bit about Pisa was made up a couple of hundred years later. Just like the Bible. Spooky.

Naturally enough, Guru knows all about gravitational pull, attracting heavenly bodies every time he goes out. However, like latter-day comic book hero Peter Parker, he is forever committed to remaining anonymous (just like Mass, US). Of course, unlike Spiderman, Guru’s special powers are largely cerebral, which can be a drawback when confronted by a broken down lift and 14 flights of stairs.

Personnel Today

Personnel Today articles are written by an expert team of award-winning journalists who have been covering HR and L&D for many years. Some of our content is attributed to "Personnel Today" for a number of reasons, including: when numerous authors are associated with writing or editing a piece; or when the author is unknown (particularly for older articles).

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