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Five Tips of Employment: #3 Perfection is Key

By October 13, 2015 No Comments

Author: Christine Dill

Welcome to the third of our “Five Tips of Employment” blog series. This blog series is aimed at offering different tips on selling yourself to an employer and landing that dream job.

Tip #3: Perfection is Key

Your first impression to a company is likely going to be when you submit your resume and cover letter. There is nothing that is more damaging to your credibility than a typo or the use of incorrect grammar on these documents. Still, human resource professionals continue to receive resumes with errors, and many professionals will not consider a candidate that has errors on his or her resume/cover letter.

How to catch mistakes

  • For starters, it is important to utilize spell check and/or a thesaurus when reviewing these documents. However, even the best spell check does not catch all mistakes. For example, they are unable to review homonyms correctly.  Words like “dear” and “deer” may be spelled correctly, but clearly have different meanings.  Also, mistypes, such as “of” instead of “on”, typically are not caught by a spelling and grammar checker. Read carefully to make sure you catch any of these types of issues.
  • Many people find it beneficial to print hard copies and read them out loud. It is typically easier to catch mistakes on paper than on a screen. And, by reading slowly out loud, you force yourself to read each word.
  • Have a person your trust review your work. A second set of eyes is always helpful when catching errors or establishing clarity.

Another important thing to note is that customizing your resume and cover letter to a job position is important. This leads to many different versions of these documents. So, as you make changes, continue the review process to ensure perfection. Make sure you get the right name for your salutation along with the correct business. It is a real turn-off to an employer when they receive a resume and it is not their name or company on the cover letter. Pay attention to detail.

It is crucial to your future employment to review your work before you place that resume in the mail, hit submit, or send that e-mail. One mistake could turn an opportunity for employment into a rejection. Keep a log of where you send resumes. You can use this to double check if you have already sent a business your resume (possibly for another position), or as an opportunity to follow-up with a business you have not heard back from.

No one is perfect. However, in the resume building business…Perfection is Key.

Stay tuned for two more employment tips. For information about our careers or to learn more about the review processes for resumes and cover letters, please visit our career pages, or contact Christine Dill at (231) 726-5835 or cdill@brickleydelong.com.