Are CV typos a deal breaker?

Once upon a time I sent my resume to a former classmate working at a competitor. Her reply email read, “Thanks, I found some typos and need those fixed before I can show my boss.”

My heart sank. I had read and re-read my resume many times. And before you ask, I had also asked two people to look it over, and I had read it aloud and used that trick where you read it from the bottom up. This was in the days before Grammarly, Hemingway and Computer Text to Voice, but you get the idea. 

I wanted to cry. I was already stressed out. My department lead had been replaced by an implacably arbitrary troll, who cared more about my secretarial skills than my strategy chops, my friend's comments ironically echoed my current challenges and felt judgmental and unhelpful. She might as well have told me to go jump in a haystack, and I struggled to figure out what she meant. Looking back I should have just asked her what she meant, but as I said I was in a pretty blue space. When that happens our frame of reference tends to narrow.

Fast forward several years: Allen Gannet from Track Maven recently posed this question to his LinkedIn network.

Analyzing social comments is my jam

I couldn’t help but run a quick analysis of the comments.* I was curious what folks had to say and as a UX/empathy junkie - I was looking for a little humanity.

What I found

The majority of commenters agree with the implication that minor typos were NBD – with the majority of the mixed comments coming in under “I agree but it depends on the job.” Still, there were a surprising number (19%) of absolute “it’s a deal breaker” type comments with the majority of those justified by the argument that typos correlated with competence.

Things have changed...

“Your resume must be perfect” was certainly the line that was drilled into me at Haverford and Yale, but that was over a decade ago. Now as a design-thinking innovation strategist and product developer, it fundamentally goes against how I function. 

Perfection is the enemy #readsomebrenebrownalready

We are all works in progress, and perfection is often the enemy of finished, good and creative. It kills innovation, curiosity and is boring. I was pleased to see that the demand for perfection seems to be shifting. At least in within Allen’s network, which admittedly has a creative bias.

Down the Rabbit Hole

As an empathy junkie and feminist, I was curious to see differences by gender. Interesting I saw a 2-1 male: female split on commenting overall. Which correlates to literature about women not speaking up, although I do wonder if the gender of the author has an effect on that.

I found that comments from women were slightly more likely to be more lenient, and were slightly more likely to express a degree of thoughtful empathy than men. This was based on an admittedly loose text analysis.

Table A: Do Typos Matter? N = 109

Table B: Does the Comment Express Empathy? N = 109

Some observations

• The “presence of typos” is generally treated as a data point by most commenters. Experience, and qualifications and even format generally outweighing “presence of typos.”
• While some folks believe typos correlate with attention to detail, I’d suggest they may more closely correlate with wealth i.e. the ability to pay a resume service. They may also indicate an excellent spouse or support network (which may correlate to performance), native English, lack of stress etc.
• Candidates should minimize typos when possible but minor typos don’t matter unless they are for detail-oriented jobs, i.e. copyeditor.
• In short, candidates should do their best but not sweat minor typos too hard.
• I liked one comment along the lines of, “if a recruiter tosses your resume for a minor typo – you don’t want to work for those jerks anyway.” I agree, in my opinion, those folks are narrow-minded and lack innovation. With that in mind,
• Innovative companies need to ensure their HR team isn’t nixing qualified candidates. From my vantage HR tends to be the last corporate domain aligned with innovation, obviously, that is a big mistake.

The truth is the average time spent on the first glance of a CV is 6 seconds. I  think that means typos are generally not going to impact the decision to call or not call you. It also means you need to be working your networking or CV text optimization strategies so that your application can rise to the top. One last thought, as LinkedIn gains traction, be nice and demonstrate humanity in your comments. As a UX/Design Thinking/EIQ junkie, I’ve noticed folks are starting to pick up on that sort of thing. As a side benefit, there is plenty of science out there that shows that expressing kindness and gratitude actually has a positive impact on mode and performance.

* This analysis was done by hand “back of the envelope” style and I’m pretty sure skirts the terms of service of LinkedIn. 

** You may assume any typos in this article were intentional and meant to prove the point ;)