Job Seekers Should Check Their Spelling And Grammar Before Sending Applications

Competition for jobs is likely to remain high for a considerable time yet while economic recovery in the UK continues to stumble along at a fairly low level.

Job seekers therefore need to do everything they can to ensure that their approach to applications and interviews is not letting them down. They also need to be sure that when offered a job their basic skills such as literacy are at the best level possible.

There has been much discussion of literacy skills in various media recently, particularly on the issues of spelling and grammar.

An online entrepreneur highlighted the effect of poor spelling on business websites on sales and found that the correction of one simple error on an e-commerce website doubled the sales of the company involved.

It is not only important for e-commerce. Its website is frequently a company's first introduction it has to a potential client or customer and bad spelling can turn them away. Would you consider ordering printed company literature from a printer whose website has a spelling error in the first line of its homepage?

The issue of poor spelling has also been a subject of lively debate on an East Anglian business group on LinkedIn and research carried out by the CBI's education department also found that 42 per cent of employers are not satisfied with the basic reading and writing skills of school and college leavers and almost half have had to invest in remedial training to get their staff's skills up to scratch.

A badly-spelled application form or CV can provide a good reason for a recruiter to reject a candidate when the company is being deluged with hundreds of applications for every vacancy.

Among the most frequent errors are confusion between "their" and "there" and when to put an apostrophe before the letter "s".

There - means "in that place" and their means "belonging to them". "There's" means "there is", in other words the apostrophe marks the missing letter "I". The same rule applies to "its" and "It's". Again "its" means "belonging to it" and "it's" means "it is".

In general adding an "s" to the end of a noun with no apostrophe, turns a singular into a plural as in one book but several books.

Another source of confusion is between "are" and "our". "Our" means belonging to us, while "are" is the plural of "is" as in "he is" but "we are".

Increasingly, shortening words into mobile phone text speak is creeping into documents and this is blurring the distinction between formal and informal, which in most business contexts needs to be understood and preserved.

Any job seeker wanting to get a foot in the door through being invited to interview needs to pay attention to these details when filling in an application form so that they don't get screened out before they have had a chance to demonstrate their ability to fill a vacancy.

Equally if they want to sign up with a recruitment agency their spelling and grammar and use of English may make the difference between the agency being willing to take them on as a client or not.


Copyright (c) 2011 Alison Withers