Saturday, September 22, 2007

Spelling - A Costly Mistake

My mom has always told me that I need to improve my spelling and it has always been my worst subject in school. I have improved significantly by trying to correct the misspelled words myself instead of using the spell checker. Jenny also helps me a lot too. This week it may have cost me significantly though.
I made some last minute changes to my resume before going to a job fair (click here to view an edited version of my resume). Since I was going to print it out on resume paper, Jenny didn't have an opportunity to look it over - BIG mistake. I really just changed two lines to about my mission one of which said, "Planed and conducted training meetings." Since "planed" is a real word the spell checker didn't catch my error - hopefully most of the 28 companies I gave my resume to didn't catch it either, but I'm sure some of them did.
When I got home that night it only took Jenny a few seconds to find my error. She showed it to me and made the change. The next morning I had 3 interviews set up so I printed off 3 resumes to replace the ones the interviewers had. As I sat down and placed my resume on the table at my first interview my eyes went right to that line and I saw an uncoverable error saying that I "Pslanned and conducted..." Frustration and anger started to build towards that one line as if that line had been changing on its own and was determined to defy me. Those are not good feeling to have at the first of a job interview. I knew I could try to ignore the mistake and hope it never came up or I could highlight it myself. I chose the second options and then asked if I could bring him a replacement after the interview.
I know this will all turn out ok in the long run. For now I was able to replace all of the resumes of companies I interviewed with. Also, I'm pretty sure I now know the difference between "planed" and "planned." See Mom - I'm still improving!

No comments: