By now you’ve probably heard about Aleksey Vayner, the Yale student who made himself a laughingstock in Wall Street by sending an 11-page resume and a video to premier global financial services firm USB. The resume/video was then passed around from bank to bank, making investment bankers all over NYC do spit takes with their morning coffee.

Before I venture into the weirdness of the video, let me just say that most people who have been conscious in the last fifty years or so know that you never send an 11-page resume. You’re pushing it at two pages. (Another resume no-no in case you’re considering it: I once received a resume from a job candidate that was a glossy 4-color paper pizza. If you folded back one “slice,” you got his educational history, another “slice” his work history. I am not kidding.)

Back to Aleksay: A VIDEO? Are you kidding me? This isn’t Match.com! Nobody at the resume reading stage is interested in your view on life.

The video itself is horrendously embarrassing. It starts with an interview with Vayner in which he offers platitudes like “Failure cannot be considered an option” and “Impossible is nothing.” Well, go Rambo! Vayner himself has all the charisma and warmth of John Michael Karr, so, yeah, video might not have been the best medium to choose.

And it gets worse, much worse. The video attempts to show off his “well-roundedness” and includes clips of him ballroom dancing and practicing karate. Maybe it was a publicity stunt. After all, he landed a spot on Inside Edition, where Deborah Norville practically jumped out of her chair shrieking at him, “What were you thinking?!” (By the way, if you’ve got Deborah Norville wanting to pimp-slap you, it might be time to take a step back and look at yourself good and hard.)

If it was a publicity stunt, he has to ask himself if his 15 minutes of fame was more important than finding gainful employment for the rest of his life. But I don’t think it was a publicity stunt. I think he’s a delusional product of the MySpace generation. I think that he may be the worst case scenario of the increasingly popular way of thinking that the manner in which one “markets” ones self is more important than having any actual talent or abilities. Hey, it worked for Paris Hilton.
OK, I won’t suffer alone. Here’s the link to Aleksay’s video. Come back here and share your impression with me once the horror has worn off.