Tim Barcz

Spelling, Grammar, and Your Resume

I was never a Scripps National Spelling Bee champion, nor am I a grammatical wizard.  In fact in high school, and more acutely in college, I did everything I could do to avoid English/literature classes.  I got through college taking one required english course, "Fiction to Film" a course noting the differences between "classics" in print and how they were presented on screen.  I'm only now learning the value of spelling and grammar.  One of the reasons I started this blog was to become a better writer (shameless plug: if you have suggestions and/or constructive criticisms, please don't hesitate to leave comments. Comments can be about anything from punctuation to content to article selection).

In my office, my manager likes to have various developers interview candidates for open developer positions.  She solicits feedback from several of us before offering a position to any new developer.  We have all applicants fill out a questionnaire about various programming topics (.NET, OO, Sql, CSS).  If the applicant does well enough on the questionnaire, we have them come in for a face-to-face interview.

Recently I reviewed a questionnaire of an applicant whose answers weren't that bad, some were misguided, and some were right on.  The only problem was the sheer number of grammatical and spelling errors.  44 errors (if I caught them all) in a few pages of questions.  I'm not talking about poor word choices or a missing comma here or there, I'm talking about sentences, that when read, don't make sense.  A sentence should be a complete thought.  I was immediately turned off.  Is this the guy I want writing documentation, emails to clients, or CODE???  In fact on the cover of his questionnaire in bold black ink, highlighted so many times the black ink is smudged; it says "Grammatical errors all over the place".  Needless to say I reported back to my manager that I would pass on this applicant.

Since I'm not the final say on things (thank God), the applicant was brought in anyway.  This was mainly due to others believing that despite the grammatical errors (they saw them as well) that he answered the questions well enough to warrant an interview.  In the interview, he conducted himself well.  He was very nicely dressed. He was very articulate in his answers.  Some of the technical questions he struggled with, but that's not the aim of this post.  During the interview though, I was handed his resume for the first time.  Scanning through it I found some grammatical errors and some misspellings.  To be honest, I was still surprised.  The questionnaire is timed and I thought that he may have been rushed and in being rushed made some grammatical/spelling errors, despite being in Word and having spell/grammar checker.  His resume though, theoretically the first introduction of yourself to people, was laced with errors.

I don't think we'll be offering "Johnny eye cantt spel" a job.  Don't make the same mistake, especially on your resume, where unlimited time for edits and rewrites can be had.  In some ways grammatical/spelling, while not directly related to design patterns, c#, and optimization, says a whole lot about someone and their attention to detail.  If you're not brushed up in this area, it could cost you a job, it did in this case.