We had a great opportunity to attend Georgia Tech’s Spring career fair today. We were looking to fill several full-time positions as well as Summer and Fall co-op students. (If you think you’re qualified and interested, drop me a comment.)

Overall, we received 54 resumes over the course of the day. As we finished speaking to each person, we’d decide whether or not we should pursue them further, creating 2 piles of resumes.

33 resumes made the “good” pile, 21 made the “not so good” pile.

The interesting part came in a lull at the end of the day – we started looking at the resumes we received that were printed on premium paper, not just standard printer paper. Of the 13 “premium” resumes, 11 of them made the “good” pile. Both of the other two weren’t printed to align the watermark with the direction of the printing. 6 of the 11 “good” resumes were properly aligned.

The point is not that I’m some sort of resume snob. The interesting point is the correlation between quality candidates and the attention they put into their job search. Standard resume paper doesn’t indicate a bad candidate, but good paper seems to point strongly to a good candidate.

Of course since it’s possible that more bad candidates will start using good paper, we’ll stick with actually evaluating their skills, personality, and experience. I will keep monitoring this trend at future career fairs.