I am taking a breather from our current major recruitment drive to rage about the number of errors I find in people’s job applications. And I’m not even talking about the kind of howlers that Guru prints.
The debate about young people’s low literacy levels may be a current hot topic, but in my experience, lack of attention to detail is completely ageless.
It’s not just that job hopefuls (or should that be hopeless?) put commas where full stops or semi-colons should be, or start every noun with a capital letter – though that’s bad enough.
But is it too much to expect that someone applying for a job should at least be able to spell the hiring manager’s name?
My surname isn’t that complicated, but it gets spelled in all manner of weird ways. Or how about my job title? I’m a recruitment manager, not a recruiting manager. And these people even have the cheek to claim that one of their skills is ‘great attention to detail’.
The worst case I’ve seen recently is a woman who was enthusiastic to the point of desperation about a position in our company, and was continually hounding the line manager to call her in for interview.
When he tried to call her, he found that she had put the wrong phone number on her CV. Needless to say, she didn’t get the job.
In this quick-fire culture of e-mails and texts, why don’t job applicants just slow down for two minutes and check they’ve actually got the basics right.
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