How do hiring managers whittle down a stack of resumes? One way is to eliminate candidates based on what Sharon Graham of Graham Management Group calls “elimination factors.” Over several days, we’ll be looking at the five elimination factors Graham cites (read a version of her article here). The information comes from a research study to evaluate 1,000 randomly selected résumés received in 2009, which Graham Management Group, a Canadian firm specializing in career transition strategy for six-figure professionals, recently performed. Today, incorrect spelling and/or grammar as an elimination factor:
Seventy percent of the résumés studied had several spelling and grammatical errors. It is particularly interesting to note that when probing into this outcome, we discovered that most of these individuals actually had their résumé vetted for such errors before submitting them for assessment.
It is critical for you to have a qualified person review and edit your résumé. Common grammatical errors include the incorrect application of commas, semi-colons and dashes, misplaced or dangling modifiers, inappropriate or unidentified idioms, faulty parallelism, flawed usage of acronyms and abbreviations, and inconsistency in format and structure of numerals.
