Your Cover Letter is Atrocious


 
 26 Oct 2012   Funny

It amazes me what passes for a resume and cover letter these days, especially considering the amount of work that computers do to keep our spelling and our grammar in check. Which is why receiving things like this when you’re trying to hire someone and realizing that it’s not an isolated incident can lead to someone’s breaking point, where you can only laugh at your fellow man for not being very smart. Which is exactly what happened when Jim put out an ad on Craigslist to hire a bookkeeper. See what he did? He went all schoolteacher on that cover letter.

Do you think they hired her? HAHAHAHA, no they didn’t. Use spell-check, people. It’s there to help you.

 

via clearlynotnormal, thanks jim!

 



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  • Terence Ng

    Technically, a preposition at the end of a sentence is perfectly fine. The original rule about not ending with prepositions was completely arbitrary.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OLxLK_R6jQ

    • http://twitter.com/Sabocat Sabocat

      I think the argument was not that it was wrong but that it was unnecessary in that context. By the way did you know there is never a situation where the word “that” is actually required?

      • TruuuV

        “By the way did you know there is never a situation where the word ” ” is actually required?”

        I do believe you’ve been bamboozled, chum.

        • http://twitter.com/Sabocat Sabocat

          Try it compose any sentance with that in it and you will see it can be removed without losing mean or breaking the grammar.

          • http://electricreader.blogspot.com/ Moosh: Hat Enthusiast

            That is ridiculous.

            • Terence Ng

              That was well done, old chap.

          • elly

            Try reading aloud that sentence you just wrote without that word in it.
            Or that one I just wrote.
            I could continue perpetually but that would be simply ridulous.

            • Average Joe

              You’re actually helping his point.

              The word “the” could easily be substituted for “that” in the first two sentences you wrote. As for your third sentence… “I could continue perpetually, but doing so would be simply ridiculous.”

              Also, you spelled “ridiculous” incorrectly.

              • Slartibartfatsdomino

                While elly’s examples were poor, Sabo was arguing that you could just remove the word with no loss of “mean” (I’m assuming “meaning” was meant) or “breaking the grammar.” That Such is clearly not the case, as you still had to substitute other words..

                • http://twitter.com/Sabocat Sabocat

                  No substituting other words are fine. You can go the rest of your life now never using the word and forging our new that-free language.

              • TruuuV

                Don’t be so ridulous, that that thatthat that.

          • Slartibartfatsdomino

            “Often superfluous and/or easily substituted” does not by any means equate to “never useful.”

            Whachoo got to say to that the proposition I have just presented?

            • http://twitter.com/Sabocat Sabocat

              You are completely correct.

              It’s a sort of linguistic lubricant.

              I’m not the first person to ever propose this. It’s a well established part of English linguistics.

          • BCT

            “Which one do you want?”
            “I want one.”
            “This one?”
            “No. One over there.”

            • TruuuV

              I fucking love you.

      • http://dailyoftheday.com/ Kabwla Two-Lips

        I am totally amazed by.

      • trxr

        “the bookkeeping position that you are currently hiring” is wrong too. You’re not hiring the bookkeeping position! Unless that’s a quirk of US English.

        I hope the wanker in the OP didn’t send it back to the job candidate. He didn’t pick on such things as “work great as a team”, which I think means “work well in a team”, and if you’re going to be a pedantic arse, you could be 100% (or more) pedantic.

  • Blinghamstar

    All that and they missed,

    “I work great as a team and work very well independently as well.”

    ???

    Also, who’s to say “organization skills” might not be referring to skills for operating within an organization (like not snitching, body disposal, running numbers, etc.), instead of the assumed reference to doing things in an organized manner?

    They inserted “to” in “attribute to the company” but didn’t consider the proper word is “asset.”

    …I was my English teacher’s dream come true… and worst nightmare. MUAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAH
    AAHAHAHHAHAHA*cough*HAHAHAHAHAHA*cough*HAHAHahhahhahaha….hahaha…ha….

    …

    …

    *leaves*

    • http://dailyoftheday.com/ Lascivious Lass

      They missed some run-ons and incomplete sentences. If I was going as far as this guy did, I’d also peg her for lack of sentence structure diversity, transitional phrases, and beginning too many sentences with “I”. Not to mention that she really should throw in some more detailed examples of her experience and previous employment duties.

      • gilkryst

        There’s only so much room on that page for corrections though.

  • TruuuV

    My only qualm with this is the “Get a real email address” bit, her email address isn’t Sxibunni69@…. so it’s irrelevant what she has decided to, for lack of a better term, name it.

    • gilkryst

      I once had a person hand in a resume with an email that was something like “bigrapejohn(random#’s)”. I couldnt decide if it was big rape or bi grape. Not that it mattered because I wasnt going to hire him any way.

      I actually dont hire people who have anything else in their emails besides their names and maybe some numbers. If you decide to put “sillysally44″ on your resume instead of just creating a plain old “s.vernburg” you’re giving out the wrong impression to your potential employers.

      • CalGore

        Its nice to know that email addresses are such a huge qualifier on whether or not you are even looked at for a job >_> lol…

        • TruuuV

          Precisely my point.

          “Woah, woah, woah. I see you have all the qualifications but you’ve clearly made this email address whilst in a more creative mood. I’m sorry but we don’t hire people on this basis regardless of how qualified you are.”

          • Terence Ng

            Or it could indicate that you don’t take your professional appearance seriously, or do not know how to separate your casual personal life with your working professional life. I could do an interview with someone who walked in in a t-shirt and ripped jeans and still find them qualified, but it will indicate to me that they don’t know how to work or behave in a professional setting, compared to the guy who walks in with the same qualifications, wearing business-formal wear to the interview.

            That suggests to me that even if the individual is qualified, I have to be concerned about whether they will look and behave professionally when they need to, such as at a presentation, meeting, or conference. If they don’t know enough to consider dressing formally, or having a formal email address to provide to a client, then I can’t assume they know how to behave properly in other professional situations, even if they might.

        • gilkryst

          It’s a huge lapse in judgement to put a silly personal email address on something like a resume. You can be qualified out the butt, but if you wont even take the 2 minutes it takes to make yourself look like you actually care, im going to over look you. Once you get out of highschool and enter the professional world, you need to leave the email you made at 12 years old behind. That’s life, lol. You wouldnt hire someone who came to an interview in a pair of clown shoes, would you?

        • Terence Ng

          This seems to be a good learning moment.

          Yes, as arbitrary as it seems, your email address is another indicator of your professionalism. It demonstrates that you have a form of contact that isn’t your personal email. Just as you wouldn’t respond to work emails in casual, slanged language, or give a resume on pink sparkly paper, you don’t want to give an email address that is casual and personal. Do you title your resume with the cute nickname all your friends call you? Or do you used your full name? Most people use their formal name because they are trying to exude a professional persona through their resume.

          And most importantly, it allows an employer to immediately connect your email address to you. If I briefly look at your resume, and your email contact is something completely unrelated to you, like “serafimbaby0909″, I’m not going to connect it to you as quickly as an email address that has your name as it generally appears on your resume (John Calvin Doe >> john.c.doe@whatever.com).

          And if I have to look through a pool of 200 candidates, chances are that a decent enough percentage of those 200 candidates who managed to provide a professional looking resume are qualified for the position anway, and I can safely cut anyone who couldn’t provide a professional looking resume with a professional means of contact, email included. So the risk of cutting “you” for listing a cutesy, personal email address even if you’re a good candidate isn’t so much of a loss, because certainly at least 1 or 2 of the other 100 people with a good resume will be able to fit the job description too. You get cut, I don’t realistically lack for good remaining candidates, and I have one less resume I need to read.

          Ultimately, having a formal email address you use for business/applications is just another way of showing you are a professional, like having a a suit or set of business-formal interview clothes.

          (Obviously, there are exceptions. You could have someone who doesn’t care about resumes, who doesn’t care about email addresses, or be applying to a position is desperate need of applicants, or a position where conventional professionalism isn’t as necessary to the corporate culture, but most of the time, a conventional part-time or full-time job will want to see it.)

          • CalGore

            Dont get me wrong, i understand the need to be/look professional. I just think tossing someone out for their email address alone is a little nuts. But i guess like you say if you have few positions and hundreds of applicants and you are assuming they will mostly all be equally as qualified to fill the position then i guess i can understand overlooking people for aesthetic reasons.

            • Terence Ng

              I mean, I felt that it was a bit asshole-ish to address the issue of a bad email address in the way the reviewer did, but then again, I think he or she was being an asshole in editing and posting it in the first place.

              • CalGore

                Thats besides the point whether it was assholish or not. I was replying to gilkryst saying shed not even think about considering someone, no matter how qualified, that had a non professional sounding email. edit: just cant agree with that.

                Also, out of curiosity….how do you feel about physical health in relation to being professional(say alcholism or addiction to cigarettes) when being looked at to be hired.

                • Terence Ng

                  Well, there are culturally “acceptable” addictions that people don’t care about that really don’t affect work ability: cigarette smoking, fast food, television. The real concern is not whether an individual is addicted to anything, really, but whether it interferes with their work.

                  In the office, for example, the only way I’d know an employee is an alcoholic is if the her appearance showed that she was addicted to something, if it showed in her work, her behavior, or even if I could smell alcohol on her breath when she was at work, which is usually prohibited during work hours. Of course, that’s generally the definition of an addiction–when it becomes so uncontrolled that it interferes with your life. And if I could tell, then that would be grounds for either a warning or firing.

                  If a person came to an interview like that–dressed messily due to their addiction, unable to focus, smelling like alcohol or clearly in an altered state, that person would never be hired. Clearly their addiction is such a problem that they can’t even go to an important interview and conduct themselves. But technically, if I can’t tell, then I wouldn’t know that they have a problem. If I could tell that someone has a worrying addiction, I probably will not hire them, because I do not know if their addiction will interfere with the job I am hiring them to do.

                  If they really do have a drinking or substance problem, it probably will show up in their work very soon after hiring–they’re more likely to be late, unfocused during work hours, possibly intoxicated or high during work, which can be problematic to outright dangerous, missing frequently depending on the severity of the addiction, and more likely to miss work if the situation becomes very severe. All those things will get you fired and may be concerns that prevent you from being hired.

  • Slartibartfatsdomino

    Spell-check would only have helped with “prepaird” and “asit.” Everything else spell-check would have recognized as actual words. E.g., “manor” instead of “manner,” “clam” instead of “calm,” and all the failed adverbs. Spell-check is no substitute for learning language.

    I would say, “Learn to proofread people!”

    Whenever I write something for work, I make sure to put some distance in between the writing and the proofreading, because the brain has a funny habit of looking at something you’ve just written and reading what you think you’ve written and not what you’ve actually written. I learned that the hard way, when my editor came to me with some stuff and said, “WTF is this?” I had to look at it and go, “Ack, I dunno, WTF is that??”

    (Or, per Sabocat, “Ack, I dunno, WTF is??”)

  • RHG

    “that computers to do keep our spelling and our grammar in check.” Just saying.

  • LlamaHomefry

    I’ve never been good at cover letters, so I’m really not one to judge – but the grammar and formatting in this letter is pretty bad.

  • ToastedMoseley

    “I will give 110%” is a standard bullshit phrase for footballers and other sports people. They rarely go above that.They just settle on that magical figure of 110. They should try going up to 111 sometime.

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  • Janet

    Are you this much of a pill to your friends and family? It is one thing to point out a few things that are incorrectly done and point them in the correct direction, but to just tear people apart for your own amusement? WOW! I’d be THRILLED you didn’t hire me.