Allen Voivod

Did You Miss That Typo? The Executive Reviewing Your Resume Didn't...

Automated spell-checking isn't foolproof. From homophones ("meet" versus "meat") to typos ("to" when you meant "too"), you need a better way to make sure your resume is mistake free. This is it...

How long have you been staring at your executive resume? Making tweaks to a word here, a switch of bullet points there, taking out the periods between M and B and A and putting them back in again...

And all the while, there's a glaring typo sitting in the middle of your Executive Summary, and you can't even see it.

Why?

Because you've been staring at your resume for hours ... days ... weeks ... and your eyes keep blowing by the typo because you're not even really reading your resume anymore.

Well, I hate to say this, but people are doing this all the time with their resumes. Executives, professionals, you name it. And what's worse, they often don't even know it.

Will one or two typos sink your resume? Maybe, maybe not. But let's put it this way - as HR staffers, recruiters, and other job search professionals receive ever greater amounts of resumes for a given position, they look to eliminate as many resumes from contention as possible BEFORE they start to consider who to call for a preliminary interview.

So why take that chance, if you can dust off a proofreading trick or two instead, and raise your odds of making the short list of candidates who receive something more like serious consideration?

First things first: Print your resume out. Trust me, you need to get away from your computer screen if you want to catch those last typos that could make or break your shot at an interview. (Yes, even a little thing like a typo could be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel's back.)

Now, here's the trick to proofreading: Read your resume out loud and backwards. And by backwards, I mean that literally.

Let's assume you have a bullet in your resume which reads, "Cut spending by 35% to meat department reduction goal, while increasing revenue by 62%."

To proofread it, say this out loud: "Percent sixty-two by revenue increasing while goal reduction department meat to 35% by spending cut."

Why? Spell-checkers won't catch typos like "meat" versus "meet," for example. (When did you catch the typo - in the first sentence, or in the backwards version?)

And because your brain actively seeks to put information within a context, and because reading backwards is such a foreign concept to your brain, you'll try to focus on one word at a time, and your brain will force your eyes to bounce back and forth to the words before and after, to try to establish context.

As a result, you get a better chance to correct the errors that could sink your most well-written resume - without you even realizing it.

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