Let’s talk resumes.<\/p>\n
Yesterday’s Washington Post<\/i> had an article in the Business section entitled “Tiny Typos Can Add Up To a Big X On Your R\u00e9sum\u00e9<\/a>.” Michelle Singletary asks, “Should someone’s r\u00e9sum\u00e9 get tossed in the trash if he or she mistakenly wrote ‘Graphic designer seeking no-profit career’?”<\/p>\n Should it happen? If you’re the applicant making the mistake, the answer is “I’d hope not.”<\/p>\n Does it happen? Absolutely. As a store manager at EB Games, I chucked resumes and applications for the very thing.<\/p>\n “Chucked,” I should note, in this case means that the resume went in a “dead” pile that I never, ever looked at again unless I needed a laugh or I was severely desperate to hire. Applications and resumes were, per policy, held for a year. Some of my fellow managers held applications forever<\/i>. Others pitched them at the first opportunity. I held onto applications for about six or seven months.<\/p>\n Singletary writes:<\/p>\n With unemployment in some areas in the double digits and job postings drawing hundreds of applicants, I understand the need to quickly weed people out. But zero tolerance for one or two r\u00e9sum\u00e9 typos is too harsh. <\/p>\n Certainly a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 or cover letter riddled with errors points to sloppiness or incompetence, but a minor mistake shouldn’t disqualify you from a job or at least an interview.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In that case, I was a right bastard, because not only did I disqualify a resume based upon typos, I also<\/i> graded resumes that were clearly<\/i> from Microsoft Word’s pre-installed resume templates harshly.<\/p>\n If I saw a resume written in Garamond<\/a>, that was an immediate red flag. Did the applicant think about the resume he was constructing, or did he just fill in the blanks that Word provided for him? A resume that looked different, that showed some creativity, that had a splash of color — these were elements that I rated more positively.<\/p>\n For the record, my own resume is written using a Microsoft Word template. But it’s not one of the pre-installed ones, and it doesn’t use Garamond. It’s one that came from an Office website, and it looks quite different than the norm.<\/p>\n One thing I looked for in a resume was consistency of verb tenses and voice. If parts of the resume are written in present tense and other parts in past tense, that stood out as a sign of addition. If parts of the resume were written with active verbs and other parts with passive verbs, that stood out as a sign of inconsistency. Little things like that stood out more to me than a typo. If the applicant couldn’t see the resume in toto<\/i>, what did that say about whether or not the applicant could see the totality of the job he sought? Was the applicant writing and revising a resume for me<\/i>, or was the applicant simply taking his extant resume and sending it off?<\/p>\n That’s the great thing about word processors today. An applicant can<\/i> tailor a resume to the posted job requirements. It’s not that difficult.<\/p>\n In any event, the article makes some points about catching typos in a resume. Proofread, proofread, proofread. It’s what every writer should<\/i> do.<\/p>\n If you’re in the job market, watch those typos, people.<\/p>\n And I cannot believe<\/i> that Garamond is Dave Eggers’ favorite font. Jeez.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let’s talk resumes. Yesterday’s Washington Post had an article in the Business section entitled “Tiny Typos Can Add Up To a Big X On Your R\u00e9sum\u00e9.” Michelle Singletary asks, “Should someone’s r\u00e9sum\u00e9 get tossed in the trash if he or she mistakenly wrote ‘Graphic designer seeking no-profit career’?” Should it happen? If you’re the applicantContinue reading “On Advice for Resume Writing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[4124,4102],"class_list":["post-2486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","tag-work","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}