Re: Adding to the problem
> It's just sheer laziness to turn in a less than perfect one.
It's sheer laziness to turn in a resume riddled with substantial errors and formatting issues. We agree on that.
A single typo or missing punctuation mark, however? Not sure I'd go so far as laziness (at least, in all -- or even most -- cases). I think we've all sent an email or memo or other document that had a regrettable typo.
(For my own part, I once turned in a 70-page brief to the Massachusetts Appeals Court that I spent consecutive sleepless weeks on, rereading and proofing the dang thing a zillion times as I tinkered with it. Turns out I left a few typos. NBD. I still won the case, my career remains intact, and I'm sure the panel of appellate judges don't think I am a lazy or incompetent person. Indeed, the opposing counsel on that case has since referred me clients.)
The "sheer laziness" philosophy sounds suspiciously like the old (and failed) consulting practice from the '90s of telling employees that if you can go a second without making a mistake, you can go a minute, you can go an hour, you can go a day, you can go the rest of your life.
I'm not saying, "hey, don't worry about typos." You and I are totally agreed there. I'm only saying that if you employ an entire department (or automated software system) to determine the best people to employ in your organization, and one of that department's primary and automatic exclusion policies is having zero tolerance for even the slightest typos no matter what, regardless of context or anything else the candidate may have to offer, you should fire that entire department and hire some human beings who know how to think.
HR people (esp. bad ones) concern themselves with typos. Meanwhile, when CEOs and other top execs bring in people themselves without the help of a "professional" recruiter, they have more important things to worry about than, say, if the potential hire has a superfluous punctuation mark.
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7/25/2016 | 2:17:05 PM
What does qualify as actual performance in a technical setting is an actual example of one's work. For example, it has long been my employer's practice to assign an actual programming problem to applicants for programming positions. An engineering candidate could similarly be given a design problem. Nowadays, it would even be possible to ask a system administration candidate to submit a virtual machine configured in accordance with requirements given by the prospective employer. I even once read a story in which the owner of a garage asked a prospective mechanic to diagnose a car right there on site (struck me as good practice).
No sane employer would ever hire a graphic artist or a photograper based solely on paper credentials and an interview (even multiple interviews). I don't understand why anyone would hire a techie that way.