With the advent of text messaging, spell check and Twitter an annoying trend is emerging – the inability to spell or communicate effectively using the written word.  And a who cares attitude to go along with it.  I certainly have my opinion on this topic, which you can figure out from the first sentence, but I wonder if it’s just me? 

I have done some research and opinions do vary.  There is a wide gap in tolerance of these mistakes by people who read resumes.  Some people provide feedback with an opportunity to correct, which I think is very generous, but many either toss the resume immediately or require a little more effort on the candidate’s part to prove him or herself to “make up for” the mistakes.

There are typos and then there are grammatical errors.  Spell check does not always catch every spelling error due to context.  It is only a computer doing the thinking after all.  You also may or may not get the squiggly green line when you should.  The result is the same – if there is a mistake YOU need to catch it and not depend on a program that doesn’t think to understand what you are trying to say.  I may be a bit harsh but what I take from that is you didn’t actually read what you wrote, which I extrapolate to laziness. Or, at the very least, a laissez-faire attitude.  If you don’t care now, how much will you care when you already have the job?  When writing a resume, being a bit anal is better.

Now I try to be humble and know that I may in fact proofread an email 6 or 7 times (which I do) and as soon as I hit send, I will see a typo.  It happens.  (Makes me CRAZY but no one is perfect.)  But with something like a resume, it should be proofread 6 or 7 HUNDRED times.  By multiple people.  This is your one shot to make a first impression and problems with your resume say a lot about you, none of it good.   

Why not err on the side of caution?  Proofread, proofread, proofread.  You never know who will be reading it, and if it happens to be someone like me, spelling and grammar matter.

That being said, please feel free to comment on any typos or grammatical errors you see in my posts!!