"I can haz dream Job? My rezumez! let me showz u thm"

That's the subject line of a cover letter sent by a job applicant to I Can Has Cheezburger, one of the premier sites for so-called Lolcat pictures.

Don't think the letter will be rejected out of hand - bad spelling is no obstacle to a job in Lolcat world. It may even be an asset.

Lolcats became an internet craze last year. According to Wikipedia, a Lolcat is an image combining a photograph of an animal, most frequently a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English - a dialect which is known as "Kitty Pidgin", "lolspeak", or Lolcat.

After he posted his resume online in 2004, Ed Pilarski got more responses than he bargained for.

More than a dozen companies called or e-mailed the retired Verizon Communications Inc. project manager with job offers he did not want or mortgage refinancing deals he did not need.

One caller stood out: A Morgan Stanley financial adviser who allegedly viewed the resume of Pilarski and hundreds of others posted on job-hunting Web site CareerBuilder.com.

The adviser suggested Pilarski "must have done pretty well financially" at Verizon. Outraged that information in his resume was being used for sales leads, Pilarski complained about Morgan Stanley’s "backroom tactics" to Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who recently charged the firm and several employees with violations of privacy rules.

Some job recruiters say Pilarski's case is all too common. The misuse of resume data has become a big issue for the fastgrowing sites that are now a main source of talent for some industries, as well as a growing risk to individuals as hackers target the vast databases of personal information.

In today's job market, turning up missing on the Web may not be a fatal flaw, and it's probably better than having a search result in a photo of you in a hula skirt. But over time, the lack of a Web presence - particularly for IT professionals - may well turn from a neutral to a negative, says Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems Inc.

"Particularly because we're a core technology provider, if someone came looking for a senior-level job and had left no mark on the Internet, I'd see that as a big negative," he says.

And it's not just about technology, Bray says. "Most companies would rather have somebody who has demonstrated the propensity to contribute, and one [sign] of that is going out and getting involved, joining in the discussion."

So who will be the YouTube of video resumes? Jobster, an online job board, is teaming up with social-networking site Facebook to launch a career site featuring video resumes in March. Vault.com another job board, concluded its first video-resume contest last week, its prize a shot at (what else?) an investment-banking job. Smaller players 62ndview, HireVue and Resumevideo are all launching widely this spring. Workplace bloggers speculate that YouTube plans to start its own video-resume channel, although the company is noncommittal. Says Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster: "I can see a day when video as part of the resume is the norm."

The company owner doubted that job candidate Eric R. Derby would make a good technical recruiter. Derby seemed too quiet, too reserved. Could he really excel in such a job?

But the owner gave Derby a chance after spotting something at the bottom of his resume.

Derby listed "disc jockey" under a section dubbed "hobbies."

"He assumed that if I was a DJ, I've got to be able to talk to people," said Derby, recalling a conversation he had with the owner months after he was hired. "I tend to come across as quiet and conservative when I don't yet know people. If that hadn't been in the resume, I might not have gotten the job."

Just remember: There is one big risk to listing those hobbies. You never know how a hiring manager might view them.

Something innocuous such as being a fitness buff, for example, might put off a sedentary manager who fears you'll be obnoxious about your exercising ways.

"It's way too much information that a manager doesn't need to know," said Jody Stolt, a national recruitment manager for the Perinton, N.Y.-based PAETEC Communications. "They just need to know that they can do the job."

when your interests or hobbies are so unusual that they are bound to attract positive attention. (One recent alumna, applying for work in the investment industry, listed "mud wrestling" as a hobby. Every recruiter that interviewed her started the interview off with a question about her hobby.)

when your interests or hobbies reflect positively on your job skills. For example, if you are applying for work as a paralegal and you love chess, the recruiter may equate your hobby with analytical abilities.

Mailing Unsolicited Resumes
Unsolicited Resumes are garbage, scrap paper, wasted effort and job-search (junk), according to Jack Chapman, author of "Negotiating your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute." Frank Traditi, Career Strategist and author of "Get Hired NOW!?" feels the same way. He says that people "treat their job search like a direct mail advertising campaign. They expect great response from blindly sending out hundreds of Resumes. They wait by the phone and it never rings. They sit at their computer and never get a response."

2. Looking for "Vacancies"
Many jobs are not advertised. Harvard's Mark Granovetter found that 43.4 percent of jobs are created for the applicant, often at the time of the interview. Traditi agrees. "It's no wonder that job seekers spend many months on their job search, or become so frustrated that they give up looking for work. They are looking in all the wrong places," he says.

7. Not Preparing for Interviews
Prospective job seekers always tell me that as long as I get them in front of the decision-maker they will take it from there. Most people think the purpose of an interview is to "interview." Wrong. The purpose is to eliminate your competition. If you don't know how to do this, then you will not be successful in securing the position or money that you want. You can never be over-practiced or over-prepared for an interview.

"These results are a warning to employers of taking too much at face value when hiring people," TRAG deputy director Richard Prior said.

"Clearly any candidate could make a mistake when preparing a CV, but three mistakes are unlikely and effectively mean that these CVs are bogus."