Job Hunting Advice No Writer Should Listen To

Call me a purist, call me over-prescriptive, but I believe some rules are not meant to be broken, no matter how old they might be.

The Brazen Careerist wrote an article for Yahoo! Finance recently called “Steer Clear of Bad Job-Hunting Advice“ in which she debunked eight long-held beliefs about job hunting. For the most part, her advice is solid (sometimes, even liberating). But as a professional writer and editor, one of her arguments really rubbed me the wrong way.

Bad Rule No. 5: Don’t have typos in your résumé
I’m not recommending that you misspell words on purpose, but I am recommending that you chill out about the typos. How can you possibly send out perfect résumés every time? Especially if you’re customizing each résumé for each job, which is what you should be doing.

Look, if proofreading were such an easy job then publishing companies wouldn’t have to hire proofreaders. So don’t make yourself crazy about the typos, because while 10 typos is a sign of incompetence, one typo might be a sign that you have a moderate and healthy standard of perfectionism.

While I appreciate her attempt to draw a line between what you can and can’t get away with (if you want to be perceived as a competent, potential employee), I argue that if writing and editing is what you profess to do for a living, is what you profess to be passionate about, then you don’t have the luxury of having even one typo in your résumé or cover letter.

Penelope Trunk’s bio says that she “writes counterintuitive but effective career advice for a new generation of workers, where she explains why old advice…is outdated and irrelevant in today’s workplace.” I shudder to think of the fledgling writers who will see the above advice and think that it’s okay to follow it. Those of us who have been in the business for a long time — who did proofread our documents until our eyes practically bled from the effort — will tell those young, fledgling writers that it’s not okay. Proofread your documents. When in doubt, get a writer friend to take a pass at your résumé as well.

It’s questionable whether this advice holds water for other fields. Some of my co-workers debated the advice over lunch, wondering if and where you can draw the line and say that a typo (or two) won’t cause a hiring manager to question a candidate’s attention to detail. Where seeing that a candidate didn’t take the time to proofread a résumé one more time (or have someone else do it for them) wouldn’t cause a hiring manager to question what else the candidate might not make time for. With marketing, project management, Web development, software development, and engineering represented in the conversation, everyone could cite reasons why the advice wouldn’t hold water in their fields. But we’ll leave the debate for those fields to other forums.

Has the definition of “putting your best foot forward” in a résumé really relaxed, or are the old standards still in effect?