I’ve been told I’m too harsh…
February 28, 2011… when it comes to reading someone’s resume.
But when someone is applying for an editing job (in this case, editing and formatting a university thesis written in Microsoft Word), I’d expect them to be more than a novice Word user. I’d expect them to have at least a basic knowledge of styles.
So when I see a resume like this, with almost everything styled with Normal and with manual formatting and spacing applied, I cringe:
If you don’t want your ‘dirty laundry’ to show, PDF the darned thing! However, all that does is change the cosmetics — puts ‘lipstick on a pig’, if you like. If this person got the job, I’d hate to think what they’d do to the thesis.
Do you think I’m too harsh? Remember, this is an editing job with Microsoft Word and it required formatting the document as well as editing the words.
See also:
- Job application pet peeves: http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/job-application-pet-peeves/
[Links last checked February 2011]
You are not too harsh. I’m on your side. Tabs and spaces for formatting make me cringe. I am in a new job where the last person left some time ago. To my horror, things that looked like tables in the PDF that I saw first, are positioned with – you guessed it – tabs. Ugh! It takes ages to do formatting like that. That would add hours to the work load. I say be lazy. Set up styles and your doc can be formatted in a jiffy.
Peeking at the formatting is a given. Think about sewing. You’d turn the garment inside out and check the hems and seams. You don’t want the Wild West where some bits of lumber are propping up the fancy façade. A professional editor or writer should know that and not be offended if you peek.
The principles of styles carry across to the web (CSS, anyone), so use of styles here would also be telling for other work.
Your analogy of checking a garment for badly stitched seams works for me, Karen!
Not at all Rhonda. As someone who frequently has to clean up documents created by people who think they know how to “use” Word, I am right with you. I’ll be displaying all formatting marks in all future CVs I look at!
I always explain to agency recruiters that we technical writers are judged not just by the content of our resume but by how we create them. As a contractor, I’m pitching my resume over the transom often. I always insist that if a staffing agency wants to make *any* changes at all to my resume, they *must* submit it to me for review *before* sending it to the client. Some of the horrors I’ve gotten back have made my sleek custom-car resume look like a wagon train with pots and pans hanging off the sides of the wagons.
I’m thinking of embedding a note in my resume saying “If you didn’t receive this copy of my resume directly from me, please don’t judge it on the basis of Microsoft Word usage; please request a copy directly from me.”
Of course, all things considered, I’d rather send off a PDF version of my resume but most staffing agencies *insist* that they have to have the Word document.
Too harsh? You at least contemplated their content!!
I’d have “filed” it immediately. With the amount of rework their ad hoc formatting creates, it’s easier (and less expensive) to find a more qualified candidate.
Not too harsh at all!
In fact, I think anyone who is hiring a technical writer should ask for a Word version of resume and peek at how it was formatted. A good understanding of styles and tabs is essential to the role, so you don’t want to hire someone who manually formats and presses [tab] [tab] [tab] [space] [space] or you will end up with that rubbish in your documents.
I saw your post today and I agree with you wholly. While hiring an experienced technical writer for my team, the first criteria for me is to have a correct (if not extra-ordinary) resume document.
My last post on my blog too covered the same topic, at: http://blog.vhite.com/2011/04/handling-difficult-applicants/.