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Subject:RE: How do hiring companies view TW resumes? From:"Dan Goldstein" <DGoldstein -at- riverainmedical -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:33:36 -0400
We don't know how "emergy" was used in the thesis title, so it's hard to
judge how "misaligned with reality" your interviewer really was. In some
contexts, even a fellow tech writer might have assumed it was a typo.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Neilson
> Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 8:24 AM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: How do hiring companies view TW resumes?
>
> My resume necessarily contains many arcane terms, some of
> which are flagged by MS Word as spelling errors. (Y'all's
> resumes have the same feature, of course.) Personally, I use
> MS Word's spelling correction magno cum grano salis, but I've
> just discovered, to my surprise, that some HR departments
> might be judging the soundness of a writer's ability by MS
> Word's count of misspellings in his resume.
>
> An agent at a placement firm asked me, "There seems to be a
> spelling error here, the word 'emergy'. That should be
> energy, right?" The word itself is cute, esoteric and
> unfortunate, but it was indeed the subject of a thesis that I
> helped a PhD candidate rewrite.
>
> I had a sinking feeling that my rejection for "perfect" job
> matches, getting no interview where it was rather clear to me
> that I was the most appropriate candidate, could be from my
> inability to spell that word "correctly."
>
> The next version of my resume will omit it.
>
> Does anyone else have evidence that HR people might be so
> misaligned with reality as to assume that they can spell
> technical terms better than tech writers?
>
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