I read an interesting post this week from David Silverman on the Harvard Business Publishing site entitled, "How to Write a Résumé That Doesn't Annoy People". David writes, "Personally, I look at the width of the dashes. Microsoft Word will helpfully attempt to make a hyphen, n-dash, or m-dash based on the spacing you use when writing. Many people don't know this, and they don't notice that their dashes are all different lengths." (– versus — for example). David continues to say, "If you don't know that your own résumé is inconsistent, how can you be expected to supervise a multi-million dollar project?"

As picky as this sounds, David is absolutely correct! It is important to be detail oriented for many professions. For example, let's look at a project manager. Their main objective is to manage the people and resources necessary to bring the project to a successful completion under budget.  Since the project manager bears the responsibility of overall project completion, he or she is also responsible for correcting the human errors that occur during the timeline. Many projects involve a writing component. That is, the project results must be summarized, and/or a presentation must be delivered, and/or documentation must be written. If the project manager cannot find his or her own errors, someone else is going to have to find them, which requires double work. So why would we hire someone whose work we are going to have to correct when we can instead hire someone who is going to save us time by finding their own errors themselves?

Let's think about Administrative Assistants. When I am searching for this type of individual, does it matter to me whether the person has extra spaces between words (Type   40WPM versus Type 40WPM)? You bet-cha! I credit my insane ability to catch these teeny tiny flaws to Dr. Del Mastro, my English teacher in high school. Having to rewrite papers in those days seemed especially annoying, I must say. But, thanks to her training, I taught myself to catch these little nitty-gritty typos before she did. And, so have many other well-trained recruiters.