Losing the job before the interview

Losing the Job Before the Interview

by Dolca Robles

There are 6 reasons why you should check your grammar before publishing, but in this post I will talk about just 1, because for me is the most important, which is Losing the job before the interview.    This is one of the most common reasons for you to be aware of and get into the habit of always checking your grammar.    This is a very frequent problem in Panama and especially among young people, who have been accustomed so much to abbreviate words or invent words when chatting on their cell phones, that when they have to write something as simple as a resume, the mistakes we can see are fatal.   Many times, they can be great and fulfill all the profile required for the position, but just because of their bad spelling, they miss a lot of opportunities.   I don't think I've ever been in that situation, but I do have a lot of experience looking for administrative assistants when I worked in the Colon Free Zone.

First, I requested resumes in English and then I interviewed them.    The resumes were poorly written, but I still took the time to call them to do a pre-interview in English and when I heard them, the difference was huge, they were always fully bilingual, so I understood that many people learned to speak English but never spent time perfecting their writing and grammar skills.   

The most common mistakes I saw on the resumes were changing tenses, They mixed the present with the past, for example they wrote: I live in Los Andes for 4 years, but now I live in Las Cumbres, or they wrote: from 2010 to 2014 I work in a food processing company, but today I was unemploy and things like that.   Another mistake was that they confused the words, for example: I worked there for 5 years, they wrote: I worked their for 5 years.  The word too, I saw it written many times as two or to.   Unfortunately, the full bilingual girls missed many opportunities, because I chose the ones who wrote correctly, since for me grammar was more important for the administrative assistant position, I was looking for.

Following a link where you can see the complete article about   “Six Reasons You Should Check Your Grammar Before Publishing”.