CV Writing Disasters - Lesson 1

I once worked for a small financial recruitment company in London. It was my first job in permanent recruitment (I had had a short and unhappy stay at an international ‘staffing’ company previously) and my boss was a large, bad tempered Irishman. In those days we got all our CVs in the post and in my first week there I noticed he was happily ripping a lot of the CVs into pieces and dumping them in the bin. When I asked him what he was doing he replied that if the applicants couldn’t be bothered to check their spelling he couldn’t be bothered to get them a job.In those days if someone sent us a CV with spelling errors we were told to dispose of the document and move onto the next one. We were recruiting accountants for some of the biggest companies in London and attention to detail was a key requirement. Basic spelling mistakes were just not acceptable.Those CVs were usually the first contact we had with potential candidates and as that old saying goes ‘you only get one chance to make a first impression’ so a CV full of errors was the equivalent of turning up on a first date looking like you had just been dragged through a hedge backwards and smelling like something had died in your armpit. Thanks to Bill Gates, word processing software comes with spell checking functions which you would think would make those errors a thing of the past; not so. I lose count of the number of CVs I see with basic spelling mistakes and this reflects poorly on the applicant. Bizarrely it’s the candidates who trumpet their passion for excellence, attention to detail and commitment to quality who usually make the most mistakes. If you can’t be bothered to ensure the documents you send out are correct, why should anyone take you seriously?In this e-mail driven environment I’m sure my old boss wouldn’t get the same satisfaction from deleting those CVs as he did from ripping them up. The moral of the story is - check your spelling!