Did you check your CV, Resume and Cover Letter for spelling and grammatical errors before you emailed it to every job vacancy you could find?  There is no faster way to put your job application in the recycling bin than through errors in spelling and bad use of grammar.

The job market is such that every single job is over-subscribed and employers and recruiters get hundreds of CV’s and Resumes per job vacancy.  A manageable number of applications can only be reached by rejecting those CV’s, Resumes and Cover Letters with spelling errors, problems with grammar, sloppy style and presentation and general lack of professionalism.  You will be amazed to know that, on average, 50% of all job applications have glaring errors, from school leaver level right through to Director/CEO level.

There is absolutely no excuse for any errors of any kind.  These days, most word processing applications have spelling and grammar checkers.  So if you aren’t sure about the right verb, pronoun, tense, spelling etc. you can always check it.  Even if your WP application doesn’t have the facility to check your work, you can still get help online through a huge variety of dictionaries, thesauri and language usage.  Sending CV’s, Resumes and Cover Letters without checking them for mistakes signals to the recipient that you either don’t care or can’t be bothered and potential employers definitely don’t want an employee with that kind of attitude.

Here is a proofreading checklist for your CV, Resume and Cover Letter.

Apostrophes

An apostrophe or   ’  or  '   is a punctuation mark, and it serves three purposes:
  • The marking of the omission of one or more letters, such as in the contraction of “do not” to “don't”.
  • The marking of possessive case such as in the “cat's” whiskers or “Peter’s” bicycle.
  • Just like “it’s” is singular, “its” is plural.  For example, it is incorrect to write laptop’s in reference to many “laptops”; it is incorrect to write a kilo of “pear’s”, instead the correct way is to write a kilo of “pears”.  Some words have a chameleon-like spelling, for instance, you wouldn’t write a kilo of “cherry’s” you would correctly write a kilo of “cherries”.  However, if you were referring to the name Cherry and writing about “Cherry’s” belongings, “Cherry’s”, in the singular possessive case,  would be correct.

Tenses

The correct way to write a CV, Resume, or Cover Letter is for the current job to be referred to in the present tense; in other words, writing “manage the sales ledger” is correct for your current job, but in a previous role you would write in a previous job (past tense) you would write “managed the sales ledger”.  Keep your tenses consistent within each section of your CV, don’t jumble it up as it projects an indecisive and disorganised frame of mind.

Reading back over what you’ve written.

I cannot stress how important this is.  It’s very easy to miss out words out of sentences because your brain thinks faster than your fingers can type.  This happens a lot and usually 1 of 2 things occurs, either the sentence doesn’t make sense or the meaning of the sentence conveys something altogether different.  The mistake is compounded when you read it back if you only skim through the content.  Try to get a friend or other third party to read your document back, not knowing what’s in the content, will mean their eyes are sharper and more likely to find even the least obvious of mistakes.



If you need to have your CV or Resume reviewed, we can do that for you it's free, click here. 

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