Typos in resumes

[geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA]

 I confess to being rather irritated at the presumption that
 you can legitimately exclude someone from consideration
 because of one or two typos in their resume. A few telling
 reasons:

 - Did you look the words up in a good dictionary to be sure
 they actually were typos? Speaking with my editor's hat
 firmly in place, I have little faith in the ability of most
 technical writers to reliably spot typos. That's why God
 created editors. (This isn't a flame, though I expect it to
 attract flames... it's a simple observation.)

 - Did you ask yourself where the writer hails from? I'm in
 Canada, and as a result, use an idiosyncratic mixture of
 English and American spellings because of our style guide.
 Sometimes one of the "wrong" spellings slips through, and
 them's the breaks. (For example, I once worked for the
 Great Lakes Forestry Research Cent_re_, which poses an
 unsolvable problem: someone at the Cent_er_s for Disease
 Control will assume I can't spell if I spell GLFRC's name
 properly, and will assume I don't check my work if I change
 the proper name of GLFRC to get past the spell checker.)

 - Have you considered the full context for writing samples?
 I'm alway a bit concerned about submitting writing samples
 because FERIC's reports use Webster's as our spelling
 source, and Webster's uses American spelling. So Canadians
 who see our reports probably think that FERIC's editor
 can't spell. Them's the breaks.

 - How important are typos in the grand scheme of things? I
 have to wonder about the wisdom of a hiring manager who
 considers a typo more significant than proper content,
 design and layout, not to mention whether the person is a
 good match for the job. The decision is particularly
 puzzling if the company employs editors to edit their
 technical writers: let me get this straight--your own staff
 doesn't have to know how to write a comprehensible
 sentence, but newcomers damn well better be letter perfect?
 This sounds like the Microsoft strategy to me: make it look
 nice, and let's not worry too much about whether it's right
 and helpful.

 I'll certainly agree that if you have two otherwise
 identical candidates, spelling skill is a useful final way
 to discriminate between them; I'd also agree that frequent,
 misleading, or even dangerous typos are a good criterion
 for discarding resumes. But as a first-pass criterion,
 spelling strikes me as a pretty sh*tty way to pick future
 employees.

 --Geoff Hart     @8^{)}     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
 Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.

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