Since the age of personal computers and spell-check features, most people have gotten lazy about proofreading their writing. If the computer doesn’t catch it, then why worry about it? The staffing service Accountemps recently conducted a survey of hiring executives and found that the most common mistake seen on resumes was typos. Sometimes, lenient hiring managers might allow one typo to pass but two typos are deadly.
Here are a few of the most common spelling typos:
Pubic – This is a correctly spelled word and will not be caught by the spell-check. It is also the most common misspelling of the word “public”. So if you write in your resume, “Managed over $3 million in pubic funds,” the spell-check will pass it with flying colors. And the color of your face will be bright red after the employer reads it and round-files your resume.
Specialist – This is not exactly a typo but rather a word that spam blockers misread. If you notice in the middle of the word ‘specialist’ there is another word – ‘cialis’. Most spam programs are set to weed out the words ‘cialis’, ‘viagra’, ‘levitra’, ‘free’, and so forth. If you use the word specialist in your resume, and especially in the subject line of an email, there is a good chance the recipient’s spam blocker will weed it out.
Manger – Again, this word is spelled correctly. A manger is a box that horses and cattle eat from in a barn. It is the most common misspelling of the word “manager”. To make things really bad you could describe yourself as “Manger of pubic funds.”
Besides spelling goofs, there are other typos that can hinder a resume’s prospects:
No email or phone number – What do you expect, the employer will MAIL you a call for an interview?
Fonts too small – Remember, hiring managers are commonly over 35 and print tends to shrink after that age. One trick is to set your document to open in 150% view window on a computer, automatically enlarging the print on the screen.
Spacing goofs – If you learned to type on a typewriter, you learned to put two spaces after end punctuation. That isn’t necessary on a word-processor so get out of the habit of hitting the space bar twice at the end of a sentence. Those two spaces will throw your resume out of alignment and waste precious space.
Too many bullets – If all your information is bulleted, you are wasting ammo. You should limit bullets to about 3-5 per job. More than that and you lose the eye-catching effect of the bullets and the text becomes hard to read.
