Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter encourages you to not be lazy and to spell and grammar check your résumé.
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I want to talk with you today about not making some of the common mistakes I see in resumes. Here is what I see time and again.
People don’t use the spellchecker with the result being that they describe themselves as “mangers” instead of “managers.” They are the “liason,” instead of the “liaison” for their firm or department. They “lead,” when they should have said “led.” And then there is my personal favorite one. They “asses,” instead of “assess.”
From a grammar perspective, people make a lot of mistakes as well. They use, “your,” instead of, “you’re.”
My point in all of this is not to be obnoxious but to point out that every time that you make a mistake in your resume, there are hairs on people’s next that bristle. You’re trying to make a good impression on someone. They start to asked themselves, “What’s going to happen when this person comes on board and you’re not trying to make a good impression. Where the screw ups going to occur?”
I want to encourage you to use Microsoft Word’s spellchecker and grammar checker. Spellchecker is perfect; grammar checker sometimes depends on the context.
When all is said and done, you want to make sure that the resume that you submit comes across perfectly. And that there are no grammar mistakes. Sometimes you have to make a visual examination of the resume because, in some of the examples that I gave, there were no spelling mistakes. Your usage mistakes as in the example that I gave of, “mangers,” versus “managers.”Manger would probably go through because it’s spelled correctly; managers the word that you intend to use.
So be conscious and you make a visual scan of your resume to make sure that no mistakes go through because certain words are spelled correctly but are being used incorrectly. Definitely, run the grammar checker. There are times that you may use a bullet point, for example, that isn’t the full sentence. Thus, you want to visually check the language to make sure that everything is accurate. This way you will make a great first impression by comparison to the lazy people who don’t do this.
I have to say lazy because what’s the big deal! You are running a spellchecker and a grammar checker. Is this so difficult to do?
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