Do you know that website, http://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/? Well, for those of you who have not been privy to the site, it’s a site which showcases people’s unfortunate autocorrections on text messages sent on the iPhone. These can be pretty funny at times.
An example of an Autocorrect gone wrong!
Like the one where a young gentleman describes his mother as a “very nice lay” (he meant lady, thankfully, but autocorrect changed it). Or the one where a lady called Amanda says she’s about to “hop on a bison” (she meant bus). The reason I mention this is because it’s easy to send things without first checking whether or not you’ve made a mistake. Thankfully, in texts to your friends and family it’s not such a bad thing but in professional documents, such as CVs this is not the case.
We all make mistakes, it’s human nature. I certainly have in the past. Just the other day I was scanning through a blog I wrote about how to get over the post holiday blues when I had to stop and laugh quietly to myself. By no stretch of the imagination could drinking “red wind” be considered a good idea. Red wine, maybe. Red wind, not so much. Correcting my mistake I was reminded of a time in the not too distant past when I worked for a different company. Typing an email to a client I added an extra C before the U in the word discount (think about it). Thank goodness for spell-check I thought to myself, deleting the unfortunate typo and hitting send.
Uh oh! Someone should have checked their spelling!
Typos are easily made and as recruiters in the Facilities Management industry we’ve seen our fair share of really bad/hilarious ones. One poor chap who had obviously failed to check through his CV before he sent it to us explained that he was on a “£30,000 basic salary plus p*nis”. We assume he meant pension, however, we don’t think our clients would have seen the funny side.
Likewise, there was the fella who addressed the cover letter of his CV “Dear Sir or Madman”. Well sure, there are a few characters in our office but we’re pretty certain this candidate wasn’t trying to insult the same people who would send his CV to potential employers.
Oh dear!
Luckily most people are savvy enough to check CVs or job applications for spelling and grammatical errors. However, occasionally typos fall through the net. Accuracy is the key when it comes to your CV. Employers and recruiters WILL check your CV for spelling mistakes and if you can’t spell (and certainly, even if you can) it’s probably prudent to get someone else to proofread it for you. A fresh pair of eyes will usually pick up mistakes which you’ve missed.
After scouring the internet for advice, I found a brilliant trick for proof reading CVs and that is to read your CV from the bottom up. Believe it or not this actually works. I’ve just read this blog from the bottom up and came across two mistakes I hadn’t picked up when reading it from top to bottom. In short, this helps you concentrate on individual words rather than sentences as a whole, thus picking up mistakes if they are made. Genius eh?
Read your CV the wrong way round
Another idea is to read your CV aloud so you’re able to hear how it sounds and if anything is incorrect. This works for grammatical mistakes and if things don’t read very well. For example, I’m in the habit of going “that crazy”. This is a phrase my manager coined, meaning I add the word “that” in a sentence when it’s not needed. When reading aloud a paragraph from a blog I’d written that contained 5 “that’s”, I was able to hear where she was coming from. I shall refrain from going “that crazy” in the future.
The bottom line is this: Always proofread CVs and online applications before you send them anywhere. Do not rely on spell checking systems. Get someone else to read through it. Then check it again. And again. No harm will come from checking and re-checking a CV but requesting a CV back from a recruiter or potential employer to “amend it” (i.e. delete that spelling mistake you made) looks bad.
And let’s face it, no one wants to send out a professional document with discoc*nt on it.
The FM Network are one of the UK’s leading Facilities Management and Building Services recruiters.
I once worked for abnormal bank… No sorry predictive text censored out ABN Amro Bank. We never felt abnormal there, the best years of my working life so far.