Proofread Your Work!

The other day I had to take a few points off on some papers I was grading because of obvious typographic errors – misspelled words, diction issues, grammatical errors and such. I hated to have to do it – I’ve never liked instructors who pick nits when they’re supposed to be judging the quality of the scholarship being presented – but I really had no choice. I’m supposed to be teaching these people, and in the world of business I’ve personally seen enough cases where a single careless mistake has cost people dearly; not calling my students on such mistakes would not being doing them any favors. Which is why I was so jazzed to find a Reuters article about how a single spelling error on your resume can completely destroy your chances of getting a job…

According to a study carried out by Accountemps and reported by Reuters, a survey of 100 senior executives indicated that 20% of them would shoot down a job applicant for a single typo, and another 28% would do so on the second mistake. In fact, only 19% would consider someone with 4 or more typos on their resume, which was about the level at which I started deducting points. Most companies point out that someone who is careless enough to submit a resume with typos on it is probably not the most detail-oriented person in the world, or at the very least does not grasp the idea of making a good first impression. Employers worry that people who would hand in a resume with typos would also fail to proofread contracts, grant applications, or bids on projects, any of which could have catastrophic results…

What often goes unsaid, but a number of hiring managers have told me over the years, is that such errors do not speak highly of the applicant’s opinion of (or respect for) the company, the interview, the job, or the interviewer. The common feeling seems to be that handing in such a product is slipshod, demonstrates that the applicant has not spent enough time on the document to get everything right, and therefore does not care enough about the interview (or the person reading the resume) to bother about getting it right. From a number of years spent writing resumes (and helping people apply for jobs) I know that the truth is actually the opposite; the applicant is so overwhelmed by how much they need the job and/or how badly they want the position that they make silly mistakes and do things they’d normally never consider doing. Which does not change the fact that the company’s first impression of you is something that a middle-school student can already tell you is a stupid idea…

In the long run, of course, it’s unlikely that anything I do in this class is going to have any real impact on my students. They will enter the work force someday, however, and if even one of them thinks to have someone proofread their resume before they send it in, then my summer will not have been entirely wasted. And there IS reason to believe that they might heed my warning and have someone check over their work before they send those resumes in: not one of the papers handed in on either of the next two assignments had so much as a punctuation mark out of place…