Résumé Bloopers

Spelling Gaffes? Grammar Goofs? They're Fated for the Circular File

We all have those job-seeker cringes. Tripping into a potential boss just as she extends her hand to shake. Calling an interviewer by the wrong name. Sending a résumé with the wrong telephone number.

Those résumé gaffes can really do more than induce cringes. They can keep us from jobs. Jobs that we are very much qualified for.

Resolutions for a better life are taking their first timid steps into the new year. Professionals ready to move into better jobs and college students applying for internships mean résumés are being written. And so many of them will be riddled with errors. Despite our best efforts, we often either don't know how to write the ever-elusive succinct rundown of our lives or we work a huge error (or several) into those summaries.

Matt Salo, director of the health and human services committee of the National Governors Association, will never forget the résumé he received several years ago from a recent college graduate. This person did not have much work experience, so he added a bulleted list of skills:

Strong Work Ethic

Attention to Detail

Team Player

Self Motivated

Attention to Detail

The poor guy paid too much attention to detail, I suppose. Salo did not call him back, although he sometimes wishes he had called to point out that "attention to detail" was listed twice.

"You really feel torn," Salo said. "You want to call these people up and say, 'Stop sending out this résumé.' But you don't. There are so many of them."

Not so many that Salo didn't remember one case that beat attention-to-detail guy. That was the woman who sent her résumé and cover letter without deleting someone else's editing, including such comments as "I don't think you want to say this about yourself here" and notes that pointed out grammatical and spelling errors. "Apparently she had just taken what she got back and forwarded it along," Salo said. "Needless to say, that person wasn't hired either."